If you read the history of any new communication medium such as the cinema, television or radio, it always happens to be bound up with advances in some underlying technology. For example, cinema was born out of the rapid projection of a series of still images on a celluloid film strip. The difficulty of synchronizing sound recordings with the resulting moving images led to about 30 years of silent films - until such time as the technical problems were solved. In between the inventions, media seem to grow and develop at a slower pace, as content producers and consumers experiment with the most...