Just as yesterday I mused a little about stone cairns as a form of communication, today I want to take a few notes about another oddity, semaphore. I'm thinking of the idea that a chain of people can be ready to pass a message along at great speed, perhaps from hilltop to hilltop announcing an enemy has landed on the country's distant shore, or perhaps from computer to computer. The tools are simple enough, the skills might be learned quickly, but by the time the boats are being pulled into the dry sand all the elements had better be in place. If now you want to assemble the team to pass the emergency message, it is too late. The system must be prepared ahead; the teams must be ready; the skills and tools must be on hand. The lesson of semaphore is that simple forms of communication can serve us very well if an elaborated web of people and structures are in place. The message of the beach-watcher is sped along, perhaps even compounded or amplified, by the elaborated web, but without the web the voice has no force. One of the basic civic skills for local groups must be to create that web and to link it to the webs that others create. Otherwise we face our challenges muted, cut off from allies, subject to being ignored or bumped aside one by one. [Image: RSS spelled in semaphore.]