What threatens communication?

Here's an interesting and uncommon perspective on communication:

Typography’s principal function (not its only function) is communication, and the greatest threat to communication is not difference but sameness. Communication ceases when one being is no different from another: when there is nothing strange to wonder at and no new information to exchange. For that reason among others, typography and typographers must honor the variety and complexity of human language, thought and identity, instead of homogenizing or hiding it.

-From Robert Bringhurt’s “The Elements of Typographic Style”

I'm currently reading and loving this book. It's a subject that probably interests, oh, maybe .5% of the population; but for whatever reason, I find typography to be fascinating.

This argument of our attention falling victim to sameness reminded me of something I read in the Sunday NYT Book Review last week:

Driving rarely commands 100 percent of our attention, and so we feel comfortable multitasking: talking on the phone, unfolding a map, taking in the Barca-Lounger on the road’s shoulder. Vanderbilt cites a statistic that nearly 80 percent of crashes involve drivers not paying attention for up to three seconds. Thus the places that seem the most dangerous — narrow roads, hairpin turns — are rarely where people mess up. “Most crashes,” Vanderbilt writes, “happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.” For this reason, roads that could be straight are often constructed with curves — simply to keep drivers on the ball.

-From "Slow-Moving Traffic" by Mary Roach, about Tom Vanderbilt's book, "Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)"