The influence of a medium can go far beyond just affecting our physical actions, though, it can also change our entire worldview.
As an example, Galileo Galilei, armed with a new medium - the telescope - hypothesized that it was not the sun that orbited the earth, but the earth that orbited the sun. Galileo's heliocentric model was a new medium of thought. And boy did it get some danders up. Especially in the Catholic Church.
There was alot hanging on the idea that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything orbited around it. For example, Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 include text stating that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Then Psalm 104:5 says, "the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Further, Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place, etc."The Church saw Galileo's theory as being a challenge to the Bible's inerrancy, and therefore the Church's authority.
But it went further than that. The idea of the earth being the center of creation gave Christians the feeling that they were important, that their god's eye was upon them and his hand in their lives. Moving the earth from the center of the universe implicitly questioned this conviction.
In other words, Galileo's theory turned the world on its head, and people didn't know how to deal with its implications, except by silencing him.
You'll also remember that much the same thing happened when Charles Darwin hypothesized evolution. The idea seemed to disprove the story of Adam and Eve, which Christians took literally. Evolution implied that mankind wasn't created specially by the Christian god, but rather, the result of chance. An idea completely incompatible with the Christian worldview.So, again, an idea turned the world on its head. The Christian world is still dealing with the implications of evolution.
Thus, an idea, as well as an object, can be a medium that colors our entire worldview.
In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, the peaceful life of an isolated Bushman tribe is upended when the pilot of an airplane throws a bottle out the window. The bottle lands in the Bushman's camp and the people start finding uses for it, rolling dough, smashing roots, music. But soon the people start fighting over the bottle and the chief decides that the gods must be crazy to have sent this tool because it creates strife in the community. He decides to take the bottle to the end of the earth and throw it off.
The bottle was a new medium, and it started to change the Bushman culture.
We did an exercise where we chose one item to drop on a Bushman tribe: a flashlight, a machine gun, an ATV, or a television. What would this new medium do to the tribe?
One group chose the ATV. They decided that the Bushmen would start using it to gather water, and then move on to using it to transport the carcasses of animals they had killed for food. Using the ATV this was would significantly reduce the amount of travel the tribe would have to do, because they would not have to follow the water around and they could get more food with less effort.
Eventually, the tribe would lose its nomadic ways and start to build more permanent housing. They would lose their skill at stalking prey because they could just zip up to an animal on the ATV and kill it. However, they would turn into very good drive-by marksmen.
In other words, the whole structure of these people's lives would change, all because of one medium. They would interact with the world in a completely different way.
Media scholar Neil Postman has compared the introduction of a new medium into a culture to introducing a single drop of red dye into a glass of water.
The result is not a glass of water with one drop of dye floating around, it's a glass of pink water. The dye has spread through and changed the entire glass of water, not just a tiny portion of it.
That's the way a new medium can affect a culture.
