Does Media Saturation Warp Our Sense Of Reality?

The word “media” is now too small for the enveloping, saturating presence of mediated observation that we all live in today. Think about two categories of perception or information gathering. Direct perception verifies information with your own senses; you see the sad expression; you smell the fire; you hear the shot and see the smoking gun.Mediated perception is secondhand; you see the crying on TV; you read about the fire; you hear people talking about the gunshot on a talk show.Just a century ago, mediated information came through the written word, with help from photographs, paintings and the spoken word.