Is Communication Over the Internet Measurable?

For our purposes, communication can be described as the movement of information from one human mind to another, or can it? All communication is information, but not all information is communication. Much information is discarded at the level of sensory memory; this is the information that we don’t even consciously notice at all. What actually captures our attention is modeled as entering working memory; this is the information that we have fleeting moments to consider without being reiterated (about 30 seconds) before it disappears into obscurity, or has the opportunity to be consolidated in our long-term memory indefinitely. Information can be discarded at any of these filters, and even after entering long-term memory, we should consider a message to have more influence the longer it is retained and the more often it is accessed (attributes which are related architecturally to the number and strength of synaptic connections between neurons).

With all of the variables that affect the salience of information to humans that is unrelated to information quantity (in bytes of internet traffic in this case), quantifying the actual communication over the internet, of which human brains are inextricably linked, is currently infeasible. The manners in which text, audio, and video use bandwidth resources as data packets do not necessarily have correspondence to the way in which those mediums are encoded as knowledge. While the reasonable assumption can be made that encoding efficiencies of brains are the same all around the globe, the same assumption cannot be made that types of media accessed over the internet is in the same proportions in different countries, subcultures, networks, etc. While a picture may be worth a thousand words when time is more limited than bandwidth, text is clearly the much preferred mode of communication when senders and receivers have the time to verbally articulate, especially the conceptual more than the sensory (e.g., this blog). On the other hand, for rapid and rich sensory communication, video and audio (e.g., camera phone journalism) have shown their superiority in accuracy engendered by their inherent rawness.