Novelist, TV writer and producer Tim Kring began his career penning scripts for Knight Rider, but is now in the vanguard of what some people describe as a "transmedia" storytelling revolution, creating stories that traverse media platforms and, quite frequently, human experiences. Known most recently for hit NBC series Heroes, Kring's future includes highly anticipated new Fox series Touch. In the following interview, Kring shares his thoughts on where we've come from and where we might be heading as a storytelling species.

David Pescovitz is a writer and journalist best known for his work on science, technology and Internet culture. He is also a co-editor of Boing Boing and a director of research with the Institute for the Future.

Luis von Ahn, then a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon, was on an airplane when he noticed several passengers doing crossword puzzles. An avid gamer, von Ahn thought about all that effort and intellectual intensity being applied to a simple game. What if, he wondered, it were possible to harness this energy for practical purposes? These ruminations led to his Ph.D. dissertation, which he finished in 2005, the first time anyone had thrown around the term "human computation," which von Ahn describes as "a way to combine human brainpower with computers to solve large-scale problems that neither …

No surprises here: the future of media is quickly becoming increasingly digital and therefore creating a brand new ecosystem of accountability and engagement - both for readership and advertising. The digital world transformed traditional media from day one, opening a universal gate where consumers, money and content migrate and live as one. I would have never predicted the incredible speed that the media world has transformed itself over the past several years. But with innovative and readily accessible products like the tablet and smartphone (notably the iPad, iPhone and Android platform), I see more and more people on my morning …

Notable media scholar Marshall McLuhan is known for coining the phrase, "the medium is the message," and now, over 30 years since his death, another famous scholar in the field of biology and evolution, Charles Darwin, interviews McLuhan to get his thoughts on the future of media. The following is a mash-up of actual quotes and creative liberty as relayed by MEDIA guest editor Brian Monahan.

When it comes to theories about how media is influencing the evolution of humans, the debate gets caught up in a sort of Catch-22 logic. Scientists who study the physiological evolution of species say it takes a minimum of tens of thousands of years for physical adaptations to manifest in a species. And the oldest recorded media we know of - the cave paintings of our earliest ancestors - date back only about 40,000 years. Moreover, the kind of media that are most likely accelerating the pace of human evolution - modern electronic media - are only about a century …