Over the last few days I have been considering some of the impacts on the way (chosen mediums) people use to communicate. So I put together on a timeline. While the foundations for internet computing can be argued to be seeded in the development of the computer in the 1950’s modern communiction did not take off until some of the User Experience challenges had been solved. Some of these challenges are emic to the computer (like sensible, to the user, graphical user interfaces). Some of these challenges are etic to the computer, these being more in line with bringing the internet into the home with computers at a price point in which families can afford a computer, or services providing high-speed internet connectivity to single family homes, or even more radical bringing the internet to mobile phonesAll mobile dates are from Wikipeida on 27 April 2012..

• 1973 First handheld phone
• 1982 TCP/IP formalized
• 1996 Google project Starts
• 4 September 1998 Google founded
• 5 February 2001 Google starts to provide search results from within PDFs
• 27 May 2003 WordPress’ first release
• 4 February 2004 Facebook launched
• 14 February 2005 YouTube launched
• 15 July 2006 Twitter launched
• 29 June 2007 iPhone first goes on sale
• 30 October 2008 Google starts to return the OCR’d results of image text in PDFs

When we think of the modern accessibility of information today we think of things being a lot more available then they ever were. This is dangerous on three fronts:

1. We can easily fall in to thinking this was the way it has always been
2. We can easily fall into the trap of thinking that if I can not find it on google then it must not be availble
3. We can also easily not update our communication strategies, so that our mode of communication no-longer reflects where our intended audience is communicating.