History of the Information Age — Fall 2011

Next Thursday, the InfoAge Class will be presenting or discussing early forms of communication. I opted to do a practical application piece. Having read James Gleick’s chapter on the African Talking Drums, my curiosity piqued so badly that I found a little drum of my own. The troubling aspect of all this is, learning how to play in order to communicate is rather difficult and the amount of people who know how to play fairly few. The reality of all this is that I may need to drop the project and come to class with a piece of paper in my hand and tears on my cheek. Well, perhaps I am exaggerating, yet it still stands that given a limited time frame, I cannot get the device worked out quickly enough.

Let me just share a video of a master player at work: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

He has a great style, but I am wondering if the style of play and the art of communicating what Carrington described not grossly disconnected somehow. If this is so, how/why/when? The easy answer is the people playing no longer need talking drums to communicate over great distances of space. No one has altered the device. You still use your left arm to squeeze the cords around the drum in order to change its pitch, yet the people playing today are not the same as those playing it before them. That may seem like an obvious statement. However, consider the notion that the technology hasn’t changed. The context, which that technology used to exist in, has vanished. I talk as if that vanishing act is new, but Carrington notes in his slim text on talking drums, that even he noticed fewer boys learning how to play messages on the drums.

The drums present two learning issues. First, as an early form of communication, fewer people use or bother studying them. Perhaps language/drum enthusiasts go out of their way to learn it, but like technology such as the telegraph, knowledge of how to decipher the messages has fallen to the wayside. There is a sort of irony to advancing technologies. They feature pieces of older technology, yet those of us who know how to use the most update to date technology would be hard pressed to even deal with VHS or audio cassettes. What I am trying to get at is, early technology does not imply simple technology. One must not assume an early technology to be any easier to manipulate than the modern piece. We lack the context in which people used/developed the technology. We also have our brains reformatted and calibrated for certain types of machinery. So, the earlier pieces of tech require a shift in thought process, which truly is an art of patience.

Secondly, the talking drums themselves our linked to a language that I have no background in. Much like not knowing Morse code, even if I could operate the device, I would not understand the messages I am sending or receiving. Call it foreign technology if you will. I am a foreigner to the technology of talking drums in two ways, namely locality and temporal. There is a foreign language component. Talking drummers model their message after a base tonal language and must assume that the listener or recipient will do the same. Not having the foreign language base becomes a problem for the casual learner. You can mimick sounds, but without understanding meaning, you are only babbling and not speaking. I already noted temporal issues in the above paragraph. Looking at a different time makes you a sort of foreigner, even if that time is within your own location’s history. You are still disconnected and potentially unaware of certain contexts. Yes, early American English is still English. No, you still would have a whole lexicon of slang and idiomatic phrases that would mystify you, much like a foreigner with a beginning grasp of another country’s language. This foreignness stacks hurdles for me to leap over in this project. It is happening slowly but still happening.

In learning how to communicate with the Talking Drums, I am meeting up with individuals in Fredericksburg who know a thing or two, but the prospects of me communicating with the drum are looking grim. Who knows perhaps I will make a breakthrough soon? If nothing else, I can talk about the links between the drum and language.