So, communications technologies are critical players in environmental perception in themselves, quite apart from the messages they convey. The 'global village' is being realized in ways even Marshall McLuhan would have found hard to imagine - and it is a village its denizens increasingly understand and care about. Yet the primary purpose of the content of our most dominant popular media is consumerism - especially in the industrialized world. This is anathema to environmentally balanced consumption. Since profit is the dominant purpose of market-driven mass media, it is not surprising that the advertising base of commercial television causes uniformity of content.
Diversity is accepted only if it produces a profit.
Disneyfied, industrialized and commercialized fare increasingly presents what is often viewed as a benign normative view of society. This is the 'hidden curriculum' of television described by the American educational theorist Neil Postman in the 1970s, a force as powerful as the oral and poetic tradition of preliterature cultures. Whether we like it or not, all television is educational. Challenging the messages We can accept the inevitability of technological development, and attend to the social impact of the new media. But we must not accept the messages conveyed as inevitable.