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The earliest form of visual communication by humans was Paleolithic Cave Art, with the oldest known figurative paintings over thousands of years old. depicting human figures hunting in Indonesia. These ancient cave drawings represent the first spark of expressing ourselves through imagery. -
Each new invention built upon the capabilities of the previous, continuously accelerating the pace and reach of how humans can communicate and access information over time.
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Cuneiform was developed in Mesopotamia as one of the earliest writing systems, allowing records and knowledge to be preserved beyond just oral traditions. -
Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged as another crucial early written language. Known as people drawn from a side view. And for pictures. -
Many centuries later around 500-800 CE, illuminated manuscripts became an art form in European monasteries, beautifully illustrating and hand-writing important works. -
This labor-intensive process motivated the revolutionary printing press invented by Gutenberg in the 1450s, enabling books to be mass-produced. -
In the 1830s, the telegraph made near-instant long-distance communication possible for the first time. -
This was followed by the 1890s births of radio technology for broadcasting. It helped with communication, news, music, and stories. -
The motion picture movies was a new mass media forms. with pictures moving really fast making it look like it's moving. -
Television combined these in the 1920s-1930s as the dominant audio-visual medium for decades. People would watch movies and later on became a huge form of entertainment. -
Concurrently, computer foundations were laid in the 1930s-1940s. The computer was made for doing works in writing, jobs, looking up information, keeping files, etc. -
leading to video games in the 1950s. Which is like television but you can control what the images do. And personal computers by the 1970s-1980s. -
The Internet precursors of the 1960s culminated in the World Wide Web going mainstream in the 1990s, sparking the digital revolution of global communication networks. -
Most recently, artificial intelligence systems have advanced rapidly since the 2010s, with potential to drive the next transformative wave across all communication technologies and media.