Why do we find ourselves immersed with this obsession with popular culture? Do you think we shape the media, or is the media shapes us? That can be beginning of understanding media influence in our daily lives and how Hollywood life is now a part of OUR daily lives. Sure, the media can influence our social behaviours by altering our perspective and attitudes on how we see the world and understand what we are exposed to, but the media is a reflection on our own current social trends in modern society as well, making media a double edged sword. I am not trying to convince anyone that Hollywood trends are "bad," I am merely stating that these trends influence the knowledge we pick up, such as drug addiction, fashion trends, international developments, etc. What we expose ourselves too, we become familiar with and begin to gain knowledge. Certain knowledge Hollywood teaches, should not be high on our priority list.
Marshall McLuhan, educator and media scholar in the 1960’s and 70’s wrote, "We shape our tools and our tools shape us"(The Medium is the Message). McLuhan saw media as an extension of self, that is, as technology that extends natural human abilities. Technologies are not simple additions to human existence. These technologies change how humans think, feel and act. The point is, that we believe that what we see may be an extension of ourselves, and cannot figure out what is real or just related to our lives. Clearly Facebook is one of the biggest examples I can explain this idea. Our reality is what we experience with our own eyes with interaction with other humans. Facebook is merely an extension to our sight (seeing pictures) and hearing (when we comment on each others' "walls"). We are not Facebook, but Facebook can become apart of our lives because it helps us to communicate easier. We can't look at these media examples negatively, since Facebook can take away from human to human interactions, but this new media ecology is here to stay and grow and extend to our needs as our society becomes avid adaptors.
Marshall Mcluhan's concept of the medium being the message has evolved our understanding of electroinc media and that the meaning behind all our new media is that the form of a medium creates the message. There is a significant relationship between how the medium influences and how the message is perceived. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.
