Media has become more inclusive (and arguably more intrusive) than ever before. People everywhere are fed hundreds of thousands of messages and information on a daily basis due to our ever expanding world wide web. We can’t seem to get away from the information stream. In Media Literacy: A National Priority for a Changing World the communication theorist David Berlo is quoted saying “For the first time in human history, two related propositions are true. One, it no longer is possible to store within the human brain all of the information that a human needs; we can no longer rely on ourselves as a memory bank. Second, it no longer is necessary to store within the human brain all of the information that humans need; we are obsolete as a memory bank…Education needs to be geared toward the handling of data rather than the accumulation of data.” In other words, our current media driven culture has led the human memory to appear insufficient for living standards today. We have become reliant on technology to capture all of our valuable information in a more effective way than our brains ever could. People no longer need to remember phone numbers, addresses, travel routes, or when their next meeting is; this can all be controlled with technology and in today’s culture, it is expected.
In the article Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape, the author discusses how media has effected our culture even further. Large companies feel the need to control the stream of content being presented to technology users at a global scale in an effort to optimize their financial gain. The author stated “As Henry Jenkins (2006) argues in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, convergence is being shaped top-down by the decisions being made by massive media conglomerates who have controlling interest across all possible media systems and who enjoy the power to insure that their content circulates globally. It is in their economic interest to move any successful media content from one delivery system to another in order to maximize profit and broaden market potential.” The things we see online are not accidents, they are deliberate attempts to get us to spend our hard earned money and business owners are aware of this. They wish to take advantage of the audience the internet provides.
Lastly, the BBC has an article titled Does globalization mean we will become one culture? where they discuss the premise of how we as individual cultures will adapt to an increasingly collective world. In other words, online media is bringing cultures together from across oceans. It is technically possible for all of our cultures converge to a point of singularity. The author discusses our “capacity for culture” and concludes that if any creatures on this planet can come together in a singular culture at some point, it would be us, human beings.