Victorians were concerned that the serial publication of Charles Dickens's novels would leave workers distracted and anxious. Progressive era reformers worried that the comic strips might teach children to ridicule public officials. The ways such concerns are framed, however, often fundamentally misunderstand the nature of media and the role of media in our lives. Instead of asking what are media doing to us , we should be asking instead what are we doing with media . Media are tools.
New media make some tasks easier to perform and therefore encourage new kinds of activities.
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.