This chapter discusses how marketing and media industries use mass communications to produce and distribute for people's edification much of the cultural understanding by which the Age of Shopping is created. Within the advertising and communications industries, one of the dominant metaphors used to describe the communications is one of “a conversation” or “dialogue” with the consumer or the general public. The media deposits that mass communications have contributed to the bank account of history are many and varied. They do not begin, as many media and marketing folk believe, with TV any more than they will end when TV ends. They do not begin, as some slightly smarter marketing folk believe, with radio. A human tribe builds a stone wall to protect its community from invasion. Over time the stones fall and the wall disintegrates. The message that is being conveyed may differ, the number of people reached may differ, but the mechanism of recognizing communicative intent in the absence of another person standing there to tell you directly is the same.