Communications

I'm in grad school in electrical engineering. My field of interest within EE is communications (that's communications technology, not like speech class). In my communications classes, we define, describe, analyze and discuss different components of communications systems. One thing that is always an assumption is that there exists a signal called m(t). This is the message signal. It means that someone is trying to communicate something. Sometimes, this will be just raw data like readings from a thermometer somewhere. But, often, the message signal will be an actual message that someone is trying to communicate to someone else. They might have written something, or they might be saying something. It is the duty of the communications engineer to allow their message to get transmitted to their intended receipiant without error. In the past 50 years, communications systems have grown enormously. You're reading an example of it right now.

One thing that troubles me, though, is that more often than not, we don't have anything meaningful to communicate. We assume that someone out there somewhere has a m(t) that they want to tell somebody, but it seems that our m(t)'s are nothing worth telling. Phil Vischer of Big Idea once said this:

For all the promise of new communication technologies, we invaribly end up using them to transmit our depravity louder and farther than our virtue.

Phil makes a good point, but I think that by using the collective "we," he is referring to believers and non-believers alike as those who use communications technologies. The problem is that non-believers have no virtue to transmit.

A good blog entry about things such as this is by Keith Plummer, called IM One Another

I feel a little guilty because I used to IM my roommates too. But, it was more in jest, and we always laughed about it. On the other hand, I knew people who were so obsessed with these role-playing video games that they literaly ran to the bathroom and ran back so they would miss as little of the game as possible.


Perhaps one good thing is that all this great communication techology is that it is helping our depravity to surface, for all to see.