There is a popular, if fanciful, perception that communication between humans was born when one stereotypical caveman, clad in animal skin and with bed hair, grunted in a certain way and another caveman understood the meaning of that grunt. And from that highly unlikely origin, the following millennia brought us cave paintings, hieroglyphics, the printing press, the town crier, sign language, semaphore, the penny post, Morse code, the pony express, the telephone, radio, cinema, the fax, television, email, the Internet and the text message. We have a lot to thank those cavemen for.

Good communication skills are an increasingly common criterion in job specifications of today. This is hardly surprising given the ever-expanding range of communication media in use within modern businesses. Before the technology boom at the back end of the last century, traditional communications amounted to little more than the letter, the telephone call and the face-to-face meeting, but modern science has given us such innovations as email, the mobile phone and online conferencing.

Read the rest of this entry »