Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

There are various amounts of articles strewn throughout cyberspace that bring up the topic of how the media could be in fact "breaking up america", but now there are books that have actually be published about it.
Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, published a book titled Breaking Up America : Advertisers and the New Media World that discusses how advertisers and the media are essentially taking over the world, therefore taking over our own minds. The most meaningful quote I personally read stated,
"...when we look at the advertisements that emerge from the cauldron of marketing strategies and strange terminology, we see pictures of our surroundings that we can understand, even recognize. The pictures remind us that the advertising industry does far more than sell goods and services through the mass media. With budgets that add up to hundreds of billions of dollars, the industry exceeds the church and the school in its ability to promote images about our place in society - where we belong, why, and how we should act towards others."

The advertisers job is to somehow literally get inside the audience's brain and make him or her want to jump out of their La-Z-Boy just to go out and buy whatever the product may be. They send out brain ninjas that attack our common sense and make us want to buy unnecessary crap; we have essentially become robots. Like the above quote, the media has such an impact on our daily lives that we look to it for support, knowledge, and even for something to pass the time. We center ourselves around it so much we forget about the other things in our lives that have been there for centuries, such as church, school, family, friends, etc.