Worldview-Shaping Media

• Media
• Musings

• Blaugust

Or: “I could actually use a bionic eye about now.”

I didn’t intend to write about every Promptapalooza topic this month, but I don’t have any games to play at the moment, and I’m trying out a new blogging idea called “writing and publishing posts.”

The prompt for August 2nd, which was actually the third prompt, [started with Mailvaltar][2], and asks What are some key sources of media (games/movies/etc) that have shaped your worldview?

This one is interesting to me because offhand I can’t think of any media that shaped my “worldview.” By which I mean, my general outlook on life. (Or, as Google defines it, extracted from Oxford, “a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world.") I would say my worldview, which I will simply categorize as “pragmatic,” was shaped much more by family growing up, people I’ve known, and ongoing observations of social behaviors in the world. It’s kind of a boring answer, but media has only influenced my imagination, which I hold separate and distinct from my worldview.

It’s likely I’m being overly pedantic here. But some of my earliest memories of media consumption (which would be around 1977) include reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The earliest movies I remember seeing in theaters would be Star Wars (the first one), Superman, and (believe it or not) Grease, which was A Big Deal. On television around the 1977 time frame, I distinctly remember Quark, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, and Battlestar Galactica, and probably others I would recognize if I saw their names.

The life lessons I would have gotten from those properties would be something along the lines of: Light sabers are dangerous, space garbage collection is funny, bionic implants are important problem-solving tools, and rings should be burned in lava. And of course, Olivia Newton-John is dreamy. Unfortunately for me, none of those turned out to be terribly useful tips for informing my future daily life.

I don’t recall ever seeing, for example, an episode of Star Trek and thinking to myself, “Oh, so that’s how you’re supposed to treat other people!” I’m fortunate in that I had decent role models for human behavior in and around my family growing up.

But if one were to ask, “What media has stimulated your imagination?” The answers would be nearly limitless.

Next up are a couple of topics that I couldn’t think of anything to say about.

P. S. It has only just occurred to me, but I have occasionally referred to my right eye as my “bionic eye” because it has a synthetic lens in it now since [the cataract removal][3]. (I actually called it a “bionic lens” in the linked post.) So I suppose the Six Million Dollar Man has influenced my life more than I realized.

[2]: http://What are some key sources of media (games/movies/etc) that have shaped your worldview? [3]: http://endgameviable.com/cataract-surgery-day/