Have you heard?

Have you ever stopped to realise the sheer economic value of communication? The most fundamental driver of all economics is human need and wants. If that be true then, by implication, communication must be right up there with the greatest of all human needs or wants.

By 2005 the global communications market was at 30% of the global processed food market. I suppose the gap between the two will never close given steady growth in the global population, but it will narrow. I cannot establish 2010 statistics but I would suspect that it is close to 40% by now.

It is not just that people need communication, they need it across so many channels. Not satisfied with a cellular phone, the general consumer in the western world also needs a laptop, land-line phone, TV, radio, newspapers and a few other channels to feed their general communication needs. Even then, the major channels include sub-channels like Facebook, Twitter and a range of other media channels.

Wow, thats frightening. I am immediately aware of it because we spent the afternoon looking for a new phone for my wife, but to be honest it is easier to look for a multi-media device that offers cellular telephony as one of it options. Wow again. We are crazy for information and connectedness.

The question I must ask though is why we are so incredibly deaf for all our listening. We have unbelievable volumes of information communicating the issues of our time. Its as though God has wired the trumpets of heaven into the amplified wired networks of the world - if he shouted any louder we would have to pray for new ears and a brain reboot. Yet for all the shouting, the best we can do is amuse ourselves as we resort to a general state of denial about the urgency of the times and the sheer magnitude of the waves bearing down on an unsuspecting world.

Wow again. Maybe we are missing the point for all the looking. Maybe the sheer chorus of voices coming at us is drowning out all reality. Maybe communication has served to anaethetize humanity and dull our senses. Maybe we have chosen to deny the signs of our times. Maybe we are so collectively lost that humanity is reduced to a wall of lemmings.

I don't know, but I do know that, though we be information, knowledge and communication rich, we remain action poor.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ http://www.4u2live.net/

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