In the beginning was the word

Communication, the key to all meaningful and successful relationships.You start communicating from the day you are born, receiving information from the outside through your senses and outputting it, first through simple gestures and sounds, then through increasingly complex signals that you learn as you grow up.

The most widely used model of communication specifies that there are five composing elements:

1. An information source, which produces a message.
2. A transmitter, which encodes the message into signals
3. A channel, to which signals are adapted for transmission
4. A receiver, which 'decodes' (reconstructs) the message from the signal.
5. A destination, where the message arrives.

It's pretty apparent that it was based on communicating through radio technology, but it mimics the human pattern quite well. The source is the speaker's brain, the transmitter is made up of the mouth and vocal chords, the channel is the language chosen for transmitting the message, the receiver is the ear and the destination is the listener's brain. This model is obviously not perfect, as it implies communication is unidirectional, doesn't take into account the fact that a message can be interpreted in many different ways and ignores context, but it serves as a good basis of what happens, what can go wrong and how outside interference can affect the process.

Communication is made up of non-verbal (body language and paralinguistic communication) and verbal (communication involving words, spoken or written) communication, with the non-verbal part being said to make up to 93% of it in certain interpretations. That means that every time you read an email, chat online with somebody or send a text message, a big part of what you're transmitting has to be made up by the receiver. The brain cannot comprehend the lack of input coming from the transmitter, so you tend to read the message in their voice and imagine their body language. That is, of course, if you know them. If not, you will use memories and imagination to create a mental representation of them. As all things created in our head, these made up models have a tendency to be inaccurate and distorted from reality.

Words are, however, not powerless, quite far from it actually, and a masterful use of them can create amazingly believable representations in the reader's or listener's mind, which can be truthful or not, depending on the creator's intentions.

In today's day and age, we tend to rely a lot on words, even though we feel we are connected all the time. How connected are we though, since we seem to have given up on using what makes up the vast majority of our communication arsenal? The importance of being able to communicate over long distance is not to be understated, because it's obviously better to write something to your loved ones than not to be able to talk to them at all, it's just that we tend to pick the same methods even with people who are within reach. And what is the most common excuse for that? Lack of time.

Communication and collaboration is what has gotten us this far as a species. If we don't have time for that anymore, where do we go from here?