Media as a addition and reflection of man

To precisely understand what roles media plays in our lives and in society as a whole we need to first understand what media is. By media we refer to the multiple channels of information flow existing within the society.

Various media have been a part of human life since prehistoric time evolving from cave paintings to the complicated network of information we see around us today. Here we analyse the role of media as a prosthetic to human abilities and as a mirror to the society in which it resides.
It would be helpful in this analysis to classify media in the categories of form and content.

Form refers to the basis on which the information moves within the society, While the content is the information that is carried. As a metaphor form can be viewed as a car while the content as the passenger.

Form in media sees changes with the accepted technologies present in the society, with time form has evolved from town criers to the internet. Each form of media has some characteristics like :

1. Ease of duplication or Reproducibility
2. Reach or the Pervasiveness of the underlying technology
3. Perceptual acceptance by the average user - Ease of use

The content however is more complicated to break down as it depends on the society, The system under which the content is generated and the technology on which it rides. The content can vary from a political propaganda poster, a popular dark humour TV show to a interactive blog with comments(much like this one :) ). However Content can be analysed on the factors listed below :

1. Authenticity
2. Social viability and Acceptance
3. The effect it has on the society 

 Media being the means of information flow in a society gets influenced by and in turn, influences the social structure. The evidence for this can be found in the radical changes society saw on the introduction of print media(The Renissance) and the internet(the information age). Media can influence various aspects of a society like :

1. The Collective Consciousness
2. Information Cascades 
3. Cultures 

The relationship among these can be roughly summarized as follows :

These variables will be discussed in detail in future posts. 

Media as a extension to man and society

The ability of Media to act as a extension to human senses and abilities ie. A prosthetic, largely depends on how well it integrates with human perception and how it manages the limited cognitive resource of attention. Because of this reason both the proper form and content are required to determine the success of media as a prosthetic.The form appeals to the human perception, the technical ability to create experiences similar to daily life but embedded with digital information allow us to appeal to multiple senses, also proper content is required that appeals to a significant amount of people so that this augmentation actually enhances some ability.
Media acting as a transparent and trustworthy reflection of a society,i.e. a mirror requires it's content to be un-dominated and unbiased, also the creation of media being accessible to a large crowd makes it open to more views which lets it represent the society better. The relationships discussed here are however not simple in nature, there exists a complicated relationship between the form, content and society in which every element influences the other.

(All of my posts will be more or less using the terminology defined here in the analysis)