Defining "The Media"

How does one define something as nebulous as the media?  One way is through metaphor. 

In J. David Bolter's "Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age",
he describes the ways in which a technology influences - and is
influenced by - the society in which it exists.   In the age of
enlightenment, our perception of ourselves was heavily influenced by
the most complex machine of the time - the clock.  Philosophers took to
describing nature as an infinitely complex yet deterministic machine
driven by the gears of natural law, powered by a spring wound by God at
the dawn of time.  Therefore it is not surprising that while the
development of memory, logical processing and artificial intellegence
has offered us a sharper view of our physical nature,  it has also fed
back onto our understanding of ourselves.  Thus genes are described as
the "building-blocks of life", atoms are clouds of charged particles,
and aritificial intellegence is built using neural-nets, (i.e., a
"net-like arrangement" of neurons).  We are still using the language of
antiquity because we have not yet developed a common understanding of
the true nature of these insights.

Jean Paul,
the German humorist and philosopher, suggested that human language is a
"dictionary of faded metaphors", which is to say that when a new
concept is recognized, individuals are forced to rely on an imperfect
yet commonly understood analogy until a more specific term emerges. 
Thus we are brought to our original question.  How do we define the
concept of modern media

Such is the problem faced when
defining "the media".   The term itself is a metephor.  A "medium",
(the singular form of media), is more or less defined as, "an
intervening substance through which something else is transmitted or
carried on" - ask.com