I remember listening to a lecture in grad school about ancient media. I honestly never thought about media existing in the pre-information age.
Turns out that media is a timeless word which best describes how people communicate information.
There was a time when books where considered new media. As the literacy of the middle class rose, a demand for the sharing of information in book form increased.
The meeting of this demand through the media of book publication allowed for something new: reading for leisure. Initially critics claimed recreational reading was a waste of time and worse still that silent reading was pointless. In that era, reading to one’s self, instead of out loud, seemed ridiculous.
