Do you read me?

Do you read me?

Many meanings of language

In boot camps, Sergeants shout to the platoon: “Do you read me? The soldiers are supposed to shout back: “Loud and clear Sir.”

Some decades ago, the film “Coma” speculated about organ transplant and their hidden business, even crime. Some years ago the film “Matrix” explored the connection of Brain and Electronic media as a means of control. More than a century ago “Nineteen eighty four” fiction novel posed the question of “Big Brother” state and governments relationship of a tyrannical government controlling people’s minds.  This threat –run away an malware use of technologies-- has been extensively debated and explored in many novels, films by artist the world over. In year 2009, some sites even publicized through the Internet selling stolen Data Bases to “customers”

Unfortunately the distinction of people and machines seems to be blurring. Even nearly “impossible” technological feats,  some twenty years ago, have come  true. For example Artificial Intelligence software,  allows real-time correction of spelling in many languages. That was impossible 30 years ago.

By the same token A. I.programs allow real-time translation of technical texts with some 90% or more accuracy. Two IBM computers achieved nearly impossible feats. In 1997 IBM “Deep Blue Computer”  named “Watson” computer won a  spoken “question and answer” TV tournament to humans.

What is worrisome,  is that many human or mental operations are also "machine like" (repetitive)  and “mechanical”,  therefore,  they are suitable to been replaced by computers, So bad for mechanized human behaviors. 


Some other human behaviors or cognitions are much less predictable and replaceable by computers such as fine tune emotions, understanding the many levels of  subtlety of language.

To state  an abstract  situation short. The simple question:

Can I help your?

Depending on context, voice intonation and  parties involved could “mean” very differently:

1)     Help to give advice

2)     Help to replace some part of a broken machine

3)     Help to understand a math lesson

4)     Support one customer in a difficult  purchase

5)     A sexual proposition

And so on. Gregory Bateson, the late British-American anthropologist presented  this    example to explain what happened to a schizophrenic person who went to a Hospital to get some medicine. When the nurse asked the person (schizophrenic) Can I help you? he was totally disorganized and  confused could not make correct sense of this  simple question.


 Language therefore—we would like to believe—is unique, But any utterance has many meanings, depending on context, voice, pitch, intonation and so forth, 


Even children know this intuitively, later on, adults seem to forget it.

It doesn’t. Even the same word can have different meaning depending ion countries, cultures and so forth. This happens much more so for sentences or long text and messages. It may trigger the memory of the “Tower of Babel” myth.

It is known in human-human communication that non-verbal language accounts  for more than 75% of all the meanings of a message.

The late founder of mass communication,  the Canadian Marshall McLuhan used to say: “The medium in the massage”.

“Loud and clear Sir.”