Heiroglyphics or Graffiti? Humans Communicating With Those Who Come This Way Later

On a recent trip to Southern Utah I caught myself grousing out loud about a person who used his black marker to put graffiti on a sign in a public bathroom. After I went through all of the reasons this was bad (ugly, costly to remove, disrespectful of property) I asked myself, "Why do people do this? When did we start making graffiti?"

That's when it hit me. The graffiti on the wall was a young sibling of the Heiroglyphics that were on the rock wall that I was visiting only two days before. The rock wall graffiti was hundreds or maybe thousands of years old but it's purpose was primarily the same: To allow the writer to leave a message for other humans to read when they come to this same place at a later time.

Humans are social creatures and social creatures need communication. We get a great deal of it by direct interaction but we have always felt a need to communicate across time; to leave a "message" for someone who would come later; someone we don't know specifically but who might want or need to know something that the message creator can share. It might be art, it might be messages about this being one group's "turf", it might be a warning about some local hazard, or it might be a friendly or curious message meant to puzzle or amuse. I'm sure that humans have felt this urge since they began spoken language.

Imagine a future where we will be able to fulfill part of this urge by writing messages on a virtual wall where anyone who wanders the virtual space and finds them will be able to read them. Maybe we'll call them "web logs".