ABSTRACT
It is not especially surprising that we tend to understand the world through the media and technologies that we have available to us at any particular point in time. To a large extent, perhaps more than we are typically conscious, the way in which we communicate affects the way that we comprehend our surroundings. Media of all kinds enable us to communicate, but they also limit and shape this communication in quite profound ways. From ancient times, when speech still remained the overwhelmingly dominant means of everyday conversation, political directives and philosophical discourse, through the manuscript culture of mediaeval Europe and the gradually increasing dominance of print from the Renaissance onward, to our present age of digital computing, philosophers have used analogies derived from media in order to describe both the operation of human thought and the nature of the universe itself.
