The history will open with the introduction of writing in ancient Sumer. It will move with deliberate haste to the present day, before venturing onto the information superhighway. Before writing, humankind depended solely on an oral culture, and that wasn't all bad. By gaining writing, they gave up something valuable that Socrates was quick to recognize, the skill of remembering. Yet the ancient Greeks began to adopt a written culture because they considered writing even more valuable, and so has every society since then including our own.
Writing depends on literacy.
Although it may not seem so at first, the very ability to read and write is also a means of communication, and like all means of communication it had both its adherents and its opponents. For it becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow the horn nicely, to hunt skillfully and elegantly, carry and train a hawk. But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics. Like literacy, mail is another means of communication that might not come readily to mind when we talk about media, yet we can compare the postal system to radio or television. Each is an organic combination of machines and human beings, which brings information and entertainment to our homes.