The Talking Drum as a Social Medium

The talking drum was more cryptic than today's social media, and yet far easier to understand by all who had gone through the essential socialization. It was all of them, rolled up in one -- in a way that none of them, that we know of today, will ever become. It was less prone to the hedonism -- not to mention the vulgarity of thought and murderous intent -- that one so often encounters these days. 

The thing is: you couldn't quite hide who or where you were, back then, if someone in the (yet-to-be-global) village really wanted to find you -- or your 'talking point'. Perhaps strangers on their way to wherever couldn't decode what simple bits and bytes were flying all around, but not the locals. There were no hackers from strange lands, either. Lest the talking drum flush them out.
  
The really important point here is that though its messages were more ciphered all along the channel, the talking drum was more in the spirit of the social media than today's social media themselves are, more and more. It was more local and more phonetic, to be sure, and less fussed or flustered by globality. It was all analog, but served the purposes. The social sharing was total, as everything was eavesdropped by everyone. And its misuse could, thus, be more readily sanctioned. 

Full-blown glocality, which we fuss over nowadays, was a domain left entirely to the sorcerer -- who could be both here and there, where ever here and there were supposed to be, all at once. But the larger reality was no less subject to magical interpretation, in that faded past, or to the complexity of social exchange. Which is exactly the point the talking drum makes, over and over again.

LISTEN: Kwame Ansah Brew's Talking Drum (The Donno)

SEE: Awesome Images of the Talking Drum

READ: Michael Kernan (2000) "The Talking Drums" SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE


Updated; September 19, 2016