"The contents of the mass media are now a sort of common denominator of American experience, feeling, belief, and aspiration. They extend across the diversified material and social environments, and, reaching lower into the age hierarchy, are received long before the age of consent, without explicit awareness. Contents of the mass media seep into our images of self, becoming that which is taken for granted, so imperceptibly and so surely that to modify them drastically, over a generation or two, would be to change profoundly modern man's experience and character" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 334).