This is a project that could take a lot of time: mapping the various media forms as they have evolved over the ages, from ancient Greek drama and poetry to online computer games. It could also call for a real scholar, which I am not.
Why? Because we who work in the media professionally must continually reevaluate our media choices as the clutter of mediated content continues to grow. Attention is the ultimate bandwidth issue; our ability to get and hold the user's attention will require us to exploit all the art forms humans have ever created to exhort, delight, entertain, and educate.
In the wholly unreadable chart above, I've speculated that all forms of communication art emerge from two fundamental human behaviors: speech and gesture. The arrows suggest the evolution of the forms from the classic seven arts of the Greeks forward. Scott McCloud's books on the art of comics gave me a lot of good ideas. This is just a start. A really complete map would be scalable (like Google Earth) and have hyperlinks to articles and more links to books and examples of the forms themselves.
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