It seems that all throughout history, human beings have been trying to utilise the latest technology of the times in order to connect, communicate, cooperate and colloborate (the 4 C's!). When I say technology it might not always be the computers and social networks of today (but I will get to that shortly). Just think of smoke signals, carrier pigeons, the horseback mail courier, the telegraph service (morse code), through to the telephone, finally entering the computer era.

The important thing here is really that humans are social creatures and we are pretty clever when it comes to finding ways to communicate even over long distances. This continues on into our modern computer driven era, if we look at some of the ideas and innovations in communication and collaborative technology dating back as far as the 1940's. From Niall Cook's book "Enterprise 2.0", in 1945 Vannevar Bush, who was then the Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, published his article "As we may think" with these visions of the future of communication: