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Digital Communication Summary 2020
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In this document you will find a summary of the lectures of Gregory Mills, lecturer at the University of Groningen, of the Digital Communication course in the year 2020.
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Digital Communication First ExamCommunication and informationstudies
Seminar 1A: Historical Background to (digital) communication
What is digital communication? digital comes from the Latin word ‘digitus’ which means
finger. Why is this important? Numbers and things are counted using our fingers.
When something is digital, it can be counted discretely (0,1,2,3,4,5,6). It is either on or off
The opposite of digital is analogue Analogue is a number that is continuous, it has no
discrete values. They are variables that are continuously changing. N
Analogue Digital
Handwriting Printed
Mechanical clock Digital alarm
Sound vibrating in the air MP3
Record player CD
But: the boundaries are blurred; Digital audio often uses analogue equipment for effect
Spoken language for instance is both digital, this because of the letters, words and sentences
car vs cat changes the meaning entirely
And analogue because of the volume pitch and duration; yeah vs yeaaaahhh
Digital (electronic) Communication:
machine with machine; internet router, usb, wifi
human with human (through a computer); whatsap, twitch, skype, facebook, reddit
Human with machine (conversation); siri, alexa, costumer service hotlines
human with interface; windows user interface, pilot controls on aeroplane, dvd player
menu
Face to face interaction:
1.Face to face communication
2. computer mediated interaction
3. human computer interaction is very difficult, computers are thought to listen to a
human’s normal voice, but when the computer does not get wat you are saying in the first
try, we tend to hyperarticulate; you raise your voice and go slower.
4. human robot interaction
Seminar 1B: The internet (past and future)
,Development of the internet, information technology and effects of human-human
communication
One of the oldest technologies being used for communication is the drum
three different ways of communicating using drum: 1, making music together, 2, encoding
messages with specific patterns, 3, copying the patterns of speech
Greek hydraulic semaphore system (350 B.C) pots filled with water and sticks floating
with lines on them, to be able to communicate more words and faster
Optical telegraph (semaphore) claude chappe, France (1792) towers on hills with arms
on them, the operators would check the neighbour stations and copy their tower arms really
quick. In this way they transmitted the information quickly. The messages were public, but
the codebook was not
Control signals in addition to the optical telegraph, they added these control signals,
which confirmed the delivery of the message
Sommering’s electrical telegraph (1809) used 35 wires to represent all the latin letters,
the sender passes an electric current through wire for each letter, the receiver reads what
letter is sent by seeing where the bubbles form in the tower
Samuel Morse (1820) Morsecode ‘your wife is ill’ ‘your wife is dead’. He wanted to invent
a new faster way of communicating. Morse code is shown by dots and dashes --…--. You
pressed a button which developed dots and dashes, each dots and dash combination was a
letter. Morse Is truly digital, pressed or unpressed
In the ‘morse’ wordbook, the most common letters are shorter than the more uncommon
ones, etain= most common.
this same principle is used in ZIP files. ZIP file storages all the most common used
things, for instance on your laptop.
The first commercial telegraph was released in 1844, which was a phrase of the bible. ‘what
had God wrought’
Transatlantic cable (1850) cables were laid by very big ships, like the SS great eastern
The Victorian internet (1870) within twenty years the British empire had laid cables all
over the world
A telegraph operating room; not everybody could type morse code, in these rooms all
the cables joint together from all over the world. People in the room would receive a
telegraph message, they would write it on a card and send it to the people who the message
belonged to
,when the telegraph operators were not busy sending for other people, they would long
conversations with the other operators on the other side of the world. In this way also
gossiping, the first viral jokes (1870), shortening words were already existing in the 1870
and the first spam ever (1864)
After morse, the first telephone came along. This came in the 1880’s by Alexander Graham
Bell
The origin of Hello has only been used since the telephone. This because mister Bell thought
that the telephone would be permanently open and to get the other persons attention you
had to say something. Mister bell wanted to use the word ‘ahoy’ but Thomas Edison, the
inventor of the record player and movie camera, suggested to use ‘hello’.
By 1878 the first telephone directory came along: it had instructions in it of how to use the
telephone. ‘when you wish to speak to another subscriber, you should commence the
conversation by saying ‘hello’’, ‘when you are done talking, say ‘that is all’ and the person
spoken to should say ‘o.k.’.
The first prank/phone call (1876)
The first ‘streaming’ music 1880 in cities throughout the world phone companies placed
telephone microphones in concert halls and theatres, you could then pick up the headphone
and listen to what was on.
The invention of Automatic switching One piece of network was still missing. People’s
telephones were connected to human operators, who connected you to the other person.
Almon Strowger decided to find a way of replacing human operators.
The automatic switch: it allowed people to dial directly, the telephone itself would connect
you to the right person. In this way, it removed the person in the middle between human
communication.
The history of the internet in 1957 Russia had launched the very first satellite called
‘sputnik’. The U.S was very concerned that this could be used as a weapon, so they created a
special agency called the Advanced research projects agency (ARPA). Their task was to
create a military communication network which was decentralized, this means that is should
still work when parts of it are destroyed and it also should be able to survive a nuclear attack
They made a network with many parallel connections, this made it difficult to destroy all of
them. This was called the ARPA net in 1969. This network grew in 1970, 1971 and in 1972.
, The first email (1971) back then you could only send a message to someone on the same
computer, because of the solution of R.S Tomlinson the @ was invented. You would send an
email using usrname@machinename. In 1976 the queen sends her first email.
The first e-commerce (1972) the first purchase was made via internet
The ARPAnet goes international (1973), (1978) the first email spam, First (1982)
The internet was first owned by the military, but they handed it over to the governments
and to private companies for control. The military developed their own network which is
now separate from the internet.
The internet was reorganized as a decentralized ‘network of networks’, your computers are
connected to a network which is connected to a network.
Internet routing (TCP/IP) each router has a lookup table of the best next node to send to
for any destination. If part of the internet is destroyed, the internet adapts, sending the
message via a different route.
The first internet chat, Internet Relay Chat (1988)
The invention of the World-Wide-Web (1989) Tim Berners-Lee he proposed hypertext,
the idea is that every document should have links to other documents. He is responsible vor
Hypertext transfer protocol (http), which is how your computer speaks with the server and
for instance downloads.
The first webcam (1993)
The first browser (1992) ‘Lynx’
The first browser with images (1993) Mosaic
Internet bubble and crash (1997-2001) the stock market went up and up and up and then
crashed.
Web 1.0 ‘internet is for purchasing, user’ internet news, online shopping, traveling
Web 2.0 ’the internet is for communicating with other people’’ YouTube, Facebook,
These social media platforms are essentially recentralising the internet:
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