Those are good points. Particularly in the sense that we are so connected to our media fairly constantly - and honestly have been since radio and television. Even the "Post" and print were fairly ubiquitous. It brings up the question how much of our lives and personalities are actually the result of the essentially fictional or imaginary products that occupy so much of our day to day time and attention.

"We are what we consume" in a sense and since most of what we consume is media, then we are what we watch as well.

There is a complementary discussion toward the idea of "representation" in the media. Diversity and representation in media is generally very good, but at the same time, it doesn't seem to be something that can be artificially or intentionally moderated. Our arts and media - stories, in general - are reflections or imitations of life, but the focus on the necessity or importance of representation in what are essentially various forms of fictions (even the news is in part often fictionalized to present a "story" - the people in the story become characters that likely are as unrecognizable to the actual people as a actor playing them in a TV movie would be).

However, the emphasis on representation seems to imply that real life or the real people should actually model their behavior after what they see in the media - as opposed to actual "IRL" interactions with their families, friends and colleagues.

Commercial media is and has always been a horrible place for real people to live. It has unrealistic expectations and incredibly life-threatening traumatic events on a regular basis. We get immersed in stories for the exact reason that they are not our lives, but drama is something we should all want to avoid in our real lives. I don't think Aristotle really explained all of drama in his short Poetics, but I agree that it is better to leave all the bloodshed, incest and murder in the theater rather than let it spill out on the street.

Also, even more tangentially, it does concern me a little bit that the commercial media has somewhat colonized and monopolized our imaginations. That rather than the shared myths and legends of the past, copyrighted, stage managed, and corporate owned products from Star Wars to Marvel to Pixar to Netflix, etc., makes up our culture (or pseudo-culture).

They are called "I.P." or "intellectual property" and that property is really owned usually by some massive corporation rather than any particular author and certainly not by the culture at large. Yet, really, the property where these products operate is in our own imaginations. In a sense, we're not really buying these products with our money, but with pieces of our own minds.

I think that the fact however a person defines their identity, it involves all sorts of commercial accessories to express it even in one's own imagination. It's commercial culture.