New media facilitate new kinds of social relationships and thus impact how we relate to friends, family, government, and education. But, new media are absorbed into existing social structures and evaluated according to previous cultural values. It is no accident that when the printing press was introduced at the end of the middle ages, the first printed book was the Bible. When the telegraph emerged at the end of a period of sustained immigration, one of its core uses was the facilitate communication between the old world and the new. The contents of mass media become popular culture at the moment they enter our everyday lives as the songs we sing in the shower, the posters we hang on our wall, the one-liners we exchange with our friends, the websites we go to find out what's happening, and so forth.
Popular culture enters our world on our terms.
We are not untouched by media, but we are not blank pages to be writ upon, either. We consume what interests us. And from that raw material, each of us cobbles together a complex mythology of images, stories, and ideas that matter to us. A few individuals will draw on the most anti-social images and turn them into vehicles for their personal, their destructive impulses. Countless others will appropriate the same images in a more constructive fashion.