Yet the role the media play is so critical to how we are building the future that if we are serious about wanting positive change, we had better stand back and take a good look at the media. The technological character of the term blinds us from seeing what the essence of media communications really is. To me, that essence is non-personal communications . It is largely through our media that we define who we are as a society or as a subgroup within society.
Media are thus the vehicles of cultural communications.
And social conditions help to shape how, or even if, we will use the available technologies. Content, technologies, and social conditions together form an interactive whole system - an ecology of media. Like most self-interactive systems, the media ecosystem has changed considerably throughout history. To free ourselves from the hypnosis of the present and better see where the media ecosystem is going, it will help to sketch out that evolution. For tens of thousands of years, storytellers were the definers and transmitters of culture.