I have a bachelor's degree in Media Studies.
Depending on who you ask, that either sounds really interesting or like I spent three years learning how to watch Netflix.
Technically, it's somewhere in between.
Studying media taught me that media isn't just television, movies, TikTok videos, advertisements or whatever the hell is currently sitting on your For You page.
Media is one of the ways we make sense of the world.
It can shape how we understand relationships, gender, beauty, politics, religion and even ourselves.
And after spending three years studying it, I've become slightly obsessed with a question that feels much bigger than media itself:
How much of ourselves is actually… us?
We love saying that's just who I am.
That's just my type. That's just what I believe. That's just what I like.
Okay. But where did you get all of that?
Before we're old enough to make many of our own decisions, we're already being introduced to ideas about how the world works. Our parents teach us. Our friends teach us. Religion teaches us. Television teaches us. The internet teaches us.
Eventually, we grow up and start calling those things our beliefs, preferences and personalities.
That doesn't mean we're robots. We change. We reject things we were taught. We leave religions. We change our politics. We discover new interests.
But we don't start from a blank page.
And that becomes especially interesting when we think about what we're exposed to before we're ready to understand it.
Kids are seeing adult things before becoming adults
There is a reason Bluey exists.
There is also a reason we don't traditionally sit a six-year-old down with The Wolf of Wall Street and say, “Have fun, sweetheart. Let us know if you have any questions about capitalism, sex or cocaine.”
Childhood is supposed to involve gradually figuring out how the world works.
The internet has made that process a little messier.
A kid doesn't necessarily have to go looking for inappropriate content anymore. It can appear through an algorithm, a meme, a song, YouTube or social media.
I know this personally. As a child, I had basically unlimited, unsupervised internet access.
And the issue isn't simply whether children see something.
It's whether they're developmentally equipped to understand it.
A thirteen-year-old might know what sex is, what cheating is and what a toxic relationship is. They can probably also tell you what a narcissist is because TikTok has given them everything they need to diagnose one during their first conversation.
But knowing the terminology isn't the same as understanding the experience.
Adolescence is still a major period of brain development, particularly in areas involved in reward, impulse control and decision-making. Young people can understand a risk intellectually without necessarily evaluating it in the same way an adult might.
That matters when the content they're consuming involves adult themes.
A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis examining more than 16,000 children and adolescents found an association between exposure to sexual content and problematic sexual behaviours among young people. The researchers did not establish that exposure itself caused those behaviours, but the association is still worth considering. (Mori et al., 2023)
This doesn't mean children need to be completely sheltered from the world.
It means age matters.
A child can understand what something is without understanding what it means.
Maybe “kids are growing up too fast” isn't quite the right way to describe what's happening.
They're not necessarily becoming adults.
They're becoming familiar with adult things earlier.
And those are very different things.
We learn what adulthood looks like by watching other people
This is where my Media Studies brain kicks in.
Think about how many of our ideas about relationships came from television before we ever had one.
I learned what a dramatic breakup looked like before I ever had a breakup.
I learned what a “cool girl” was supposed to look like from movies.
I learned that certain men were supposed to be mysterious and emotionally unavailable because apparently suffering silently in a shiny jacket is a personality trait.
Media rarely has to tell us, “This is how you should behave.” It can simply show us something often enough that it starts to feel normal.
If every woman portrayed as desirable looks a certain way, that becomes part of our idea of desirability.
If the male romantic lead is consistently dominant, muscular and emotionally unavailable, those traits can start looking less like character choices and more like expectations.
Eventually, we're not necessarily copying a specific character.
We're absorbing the pattern.
We don't choose every belief we start with
Religion is one of the clearest examples.
One child grows up going to church every Sunday. Another grows up in a Muslim household. Another grows up around astrology or witchcraft. Another grows up without religion at all.
None of them are born with a little sign saying Christian, Muslim, witch or atheist.
They're introduced to different frameworks for understanding the world.
Research into children's religious and supernatural beliefs has found that cultural learning plays an important role in how these ideas develop. (Payir, Corriveau & Harris, 2023)
That doesn't prove one belief system is right or another is wrong.
It tells us something much simpler:
The world we grow up in gives us a starting point.
If you grow up believing prayer is communication with God, prayer makes sense.
If you grow up around another spiritual tradition, something else might make sense.
If you grow up without religion, both might seem strange.
We tend to think our worldview is simply the way things are.
Sometimes it's just the way things were explained to us.
Then we start enforcing the "rules"
This is where social norms get interesting.
Someone makes fun of a boy for being feminine.
Someone tells a girl she's “asking for attention.”
Someone questions a man because his girlfriend earns more money.
Someone judges a woman because she doesn't want children.
Someone tells a man he's not a “real man” because he doesn't want to be a provider.
Nobody necessarily had to sit them down and explain the rules.
They've already learned them.
And there is nothing wrong with choosing a traditional life. A woman can want a traditional relationship. A man can want to provide for his family.
The problem is when preference becomes prescription.
When my choice becomes your obligation.
That's when a social norm stops being something we participate in and becomes something we enforce.
And now the algorithm is learning us back
Here's the part that makes all of this particularly weird:
The influence doesn't stop when we become adults.
We continue consuming media. But now, the media doesn't just sit there waiting for us.
It watches us back.
You like it.
You comment.
You watch another video about the same thing.
Eventually, your feed starts looking a little more like you.
Then you keep engaging with it because, well, it looks like you.
It's a feedback loop.
This becomes especially interesting with politics.
Maybe you see a political video from someone on the left and agree with one thing they say. Or maybe you see someone on the right and agree with one of their arguments.
You engage with it.
The platform learns from that engagement, and you may start receiving more content resembling what you've already interacted with.
So maybe we should stop thinking about algorithms as things that simply feed us what we like.
We feed the algorithm, and then the algorithm feeds us back.
And that's where some responsibility comes back to us.
If you want a more rounded understanding of the world, you can intentionally follow people from different cultures. Read opinions you don't immediately agree with. Watch media made by people who don't look, think or live like you.
Not because you have to change your mind.
Just because you might want to know why you believe what you believe.
And if you genuinely like the little corner of the internet you've created for yourself?
Keep it.
I'm just suggesting that every once in a while, it might be worth looking at your feed and asking:
Did I choose this world, or did I just get really good at interacting with the one that was handed to me?
Because maybe free will isn't the absence of influence.
Maybe it's recognizing the influences around you and deciding which ones deserve to stay.
