Communications on the planet began when the world was at a stage where messages from one tribe of people to another did not involve the messenger being executed on arrival.

The top speed of communication was the speed of a galloping horse or, in rough terrain, the speed of a running person. Famously, in Greek history, the first marathon was the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield near the town of Marathon to Athens in 490 BC.

According to legend, Pheidippides ran the 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to the Athenians. And that, for many years, was that. Here we must distinguish between ‘messages’ and ‘signals’. A signal, for example, a noon-day gun, travels fairly swiftly but can only send a single message. The flags or sirens on a ship can send multiple messages but these are, of necessity, general in nature (my friend SC has a T-shirt with the naval pennant for the letter ‘D’ on the front. It stands for ‘keep clear of me, I am manoeuvring with difficulty’ and he wears it on Fridays to the pub).

In 1800, the Chappe brothers devised a system of communication, whereby semaphore signals from a specially constructed tower could be viewed from a similar tower about 5 km away. This allowed a message to be transmitted from Paris to Lille, about 150 miles away, in a period of 30 minutes.

It took about 80 years for Morse and the telegraph to give way to wireless transmission of Morse code by Marconi. In 1922, the first wireless voice transmissions took place from the BBC.

The concept of ‘private communication’, whereby one person could speak to another across a distance in real time, began with Alexander Bell in 1876 and the telephone. This invention was more or less unchanged in operation for the next 120 years – you picked up the receiver, dialled the number using a circular dial with numbers at a given spacing (or asked the operator to get a number for you and phone back) and that was how it worked.

Around 1990, the keypad and the cellphone took over – but we still say “dial a number” and the symbol for the telephone number is still the shape of an old telephone headset. We also say, “I called but they hung up”, which refers to the days when the telephone receiver was separated from the mouth piece, which was fixed to the telephone. To terminate the call, you hung the receiver back onto the telephone casing.

One would have thought that, with all the easy communication systems around us, things would have become way easier because people understand far more clearly what is going on. But, in point of fact, this is not the case. Because smartphones allow us to see who is calling us, they allow people not to answer the phone because they choose not to.

Thus, for example, I met a girl (called A, and rather liked her). I called her three times to ask if she would like to go for a drink. She never answered the phone because she could see it was me. For all she knew, I could have been calling to offer her a business deal. In times before, without a cellphone, she could have just declined politely. Or declined whatever. And then, because of the instantaneous nature of personal and general communication, collective effort becomes more difficult rather than less difficult. If one gets ten emails demanding action and a lot of cellphone calls demanding the same, one will, in general, respond to the most insistent rather than dealing with them in turn.

This results in hurried responses, which often contain mistakes that have to be corrected. Good communication is vital to good order but what about ‘over communication’? Is it possible that there is some sort of ‘Bell curve’, whereby the fact that we can get spam calls from salespersons and spam emails on a daily basis will result in us communicating less rather than more? It is not an impossible concept.