Domestic Tendencies

Sitting at home in the living room. Across from me on the other couch my roommates are watching goofy youtube videos. If this isn't an example of "the media being the message" I don't know what is. Youtube has changed the way we spend leisure time together. Showing one another the newest goofy videos we've seen. It's like posting it on Facebook but instead we can show each other instantly, in this carnal dimension. Like we've brought Facebook offline, into this plane of reality. It makes me wonder if this has happened with other forms of media. When a medium's affordances are brought back into our life separate from the medium. Like with the telephone. It could be that certain habits acquired from the use of telephones made their way into regular speech. We innovate and develop our technology. We attempt to incorporate, to "domesticate," new media in our daily lives. We accomplish this process of domestication. We've reconciled the disparity between before and after. But we can't stop there. We can't merely incorporate the new medium and it's affordances into our lives. Because of the adoption, incorporation, or domestication of the new medium we continue to replace our old habits acquired through the use of old media with new habits developed through the use of the new medium. Because of similar affordances in the new and old media we domesticate the new medium by making it (and the actions associated with it) the norm. I believe a good example of what I'm getting at is email. Because email has become the norm, that is to say it's become domesticated, we now compose letter's like we would compose emails. The content of the letter may be the same as it would pre-email, but the essence of the letter is forever lost. Instead of a letter we have a printed email. The essence is all email, the medium is still paper, it's still an email, it's not a letter. This train of thought begs the question. Now that Facebook has become the norm, are our offline relationships fated to function solely under the new habits formed by the domestication of the new medium?