Why are pop culture zombies so strongly associated with communication & communications technologies?

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There are several apparently-independent books/movies where cell phones turn people into zombies (and, as far as I am aware, none where cell phones turn people into vampires or werewolves).
There’s stuff like Pontypool (book & film) or Hyenas (book), where zombieism is either spread by language or created by the absence of language.

More conventional zombie media is absolutely obsessed with communication too. We’re constantly seeing broadcast media, or pirate radio transmissions, or concerned with the ability to communicate for coordination purposes.

A big plot point in the Dawn of the Dead remake, for instance, is that one character is isolated and can only be communicated with via a white board. An attempt to get a walkie-talkie to him ends in his death.
There are always miscommunications, communications breakdowns, and secrets as pivots around which the plot revolves. Or, alternately, the plot is about coordination among the zombies — are they telepaths? Are they learning to speak? Are they swarming like ants or bees?

A philosophical zombie is a person with a big secret — the secret that they have no secrets — and this secret cannot be discovered through communication. Except — in BlindSight, the ending twist is that we find that the p-zombies have taken over because there’s no music on the radio!

I think I have a possible answer for why communication is so important in media about pop-culture zombies.

It’s because the Romero zombie and its ilk is basically an inversion of time-binding.

Time binding is an attribute of most writing technologies and all recording technologies. Basically, speech is gone as soon as you speak it & can only be preserved through (fallible) memory; writing is, from the beginning, so permanent that it’s easy for it to outlive you.

If you write a book, say, even if you write it in private and lock the ms in the drawer where nobody will ever find it, you have taken a fragment of your mind and made it outlive your body.

The zombie is what happens if (fragments of) your body outlive your mind.

The romero zombie’s popularity tracks roughly with the growth of time binding impacting people’s lives. You first see it around the time that paranoia around phone taps and bugs started becoming big in the counterculture (while Nixon’s tapes were in the conversation).

It became big again in asia when cheap camcorders became widely available — and we get a huge number of indie zombie flicks shot on these cheap camcorders, distributed on VCD.

Peak zombie in the US coincided with the period roughly from the beginning of the patriot act to the snowden revelations — a period during which we were all joining social networks despite being reminded that our data was being mind & that every shitpost would last forever.

Now, why we should want the opposite of our current media environment reflected in the fiction of our media, I don’t know…