Asynchronous lacks synchrony.
The adjective asynchronous qualifies that which does not have synchrony . This term (synchrony), for its part, refers to what coincides in time . There are, in this framework, various elements that are asynchronous.
Asynchronous communication is the communicative process that is carried out without temporal coincidence. This means that the emission and reception of messages are separated by a certain period of time .
postal correspondence
Postal correspondence is an example of asynchronous communication. The sender (who writes the letter and sends it) knows that his message will not be responded to instantly. The recipient (the one who receives the letter), for his part, also understands that he will be able to access the content only upon physically receiving the correspondence (which is the transmission channel of the message).
A person can write a letter in Portugal and send it on January 5 from that country to Colombia . The recipient receives the letter on January 12 and reads the message on that date. This is how this asynchronous communication develops.
Postal mail is an example of asynchronous communication.
The asynchronous in a television broadcast
The showing of an event on television can also be asynchronous when it is delayed. If a TV channel records the development of a concert that takes place on Saturday but broadcasts it on the following Tuesday, there is asynchrony.
The performance of the concert (Saturday) does not coincide in time with its television showing (Tuesday). On the other hand, if the broadcast had been carried out live, viewers would have had the possibility of observing the actions simultaneously with their actual development.
Search for immediacy
It is very curious to note that, despite the need that human beings have developed in recent decades to obtain immediate answers and live at an unbridled pace, a large part of our activities are characterized by an asynchronous flow. Postal correspondence is an example that may seem like something from the past, but its digital version, the email service, is also asynchronous.
As a result of the aforementioned need to speed up communication, email has lost a lot of popularity, in favor of social networks and instant messaging services. Once again, none of them occur in a truly immediate way, given that there are a large number of factors that lead to a certain delay in communication , such as the instability of the networks and the impossibility of carrying out all the processes simultaneously. .
Technically, chat is the greatest exponent of synchronous communication - the opposite of asynchronous - since it allows two or more individuals to maintain conversations with a fluidity comparable to what they could experience face to face. From a technical point of view, we cannot call it asynchronous because the most superficial tasks are performed consecutively, one after another, regardless of the thousands of intermediate processes.
Causes of an asynchronous process
It is important to note that asynchronous processes do not always happen for the same reasons. On the one hand, there are those that cannot be carried out in any other way, such as postal correspondence: there is no means that allows us to physically send a letter from one point to another on the planet instantly. However, sometimes it is a decision that does not arise as a result of a limitation, but as part of a conscious design .
In programming, many challenges arise related to the performance of processors, which generally force developers to prioritize certain processes or the immediacy with which they are carried out, and this results in synchronous execution. or asynchronous. Depending on the program, the user does not always perceive this difference since - from their point of view - everything happens at high speed.