I was talking with my girlfriend who mentioned that in her Speech class they were discussing the forms of Communication and what exactly is taking place. Inflection, body language, verbal sounds – the whole adage “Communication is 10% what you say and 90% what you don’t say”. I view these two types of communication (verbal and non-verbal) as data and meta-data, respectively.
Some people say that our ability to communicate meaningful thoughts and information to others is a characteristic that separates humans from animals. I would disagree. Sure our method of communication is fairly complex, but if you consider the colonies of insects that have millions in such a small place, yet they can manage to communicate amongst the masses just fine. They can find, and retrieve food as well as spread the information about the location and type of food discovered. And yet, insects do not have a brain – merely a primary nerve inside their exoskeleton.
My current project at work is to get our e-commerce system organized. To do this, I am creating an entire content management system from scratch – a blank notepad document, a blank png canvas, and pure creativity. The challenge is getting one system to communicate everything necessary so that the new system can understand it. Then the new system has to communicate intrinsic and extrinsic data to the human to process that which requires human intervention. Things that are repeated can be written into the new system’s code in such a way that the human doesn’t need to be involved. The human already has a basic understanding of the old system – so the new system has to take that into consideration when displaying new intrinsic data to make it relevant to the human.
Once all the processing is done, the new system exports things that need to be changed in the old system in such a way that the old system can perform its duty.
I would argue that the ability to communicate is not something that is innately human. When we’re born we cry until we can understand and form meaningful sounds. In a software system, things break, unless they are coded to produce meaningful output. Even language interpreters must understand both sides of the languages they interpret (which sounds represent which objects and concepts) in order to relay one person’s data and meta-data to the other person.
