For Clarification

Rick Williams, an award-winning photographer, talks about the visual communication theory of Omniphasism (which means all in balance) in my Media Design and Language textbook Graphic Communications Today. In his discussion, he writes how the media does sway society.
Williams says, "Although we have always lived in a vivid, colorful world, understanding visual communication is especially important today because so much of what we come to know through our eyes has been specifically designed by advertising and media creators to carry persuasive messages. Everything--from the newspapers and magazines that we read, to packaging, advertising, film, television, the Internet, and other graphic communications that inundate us--affects our lives and our thinking."
"These messages attempt to define what is real and normal in terms of how we live and act," writes Williams. "This is particularly significant because our unconscious cognitive processing system often does not distinguish between real and mediated events as it logs the unconscious memories and meanings that help us make decisions based on our intuitive cognitive understanding. That is why the media are such powerful tools; they shape the norms and thinking of our culture. Think about it."
"The average American see between 4,000 and 5,000 "mediated" images each day," Williams says. "For example, if those images regularly portray women as 5' 10" and 110 pounds, like the average supermodel, then this image becomes the norm by which we judge all women. If lifestyles of the rich and famous are what we most often see, then those are the lifestyles that we are most likely to define as normal and real even though they are mostly imaginary, existing primarily in the minds of media artists and in the media."