In today’s fast paced society, developing and sustaining a myth can prove to be quite difficult.  Joseph Campbell stated our myths are currently outdated and that we are living in a “myth-less” world.  Campbell’s theory is partly right.  Since our society questions everything, it can become hard for any myth to take ground.  There are television shows, “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel for instance, that investigates and tries to debunk many popular myths that we all know.  What I believe, however, is not that we are myth-less; our form of storytelling has changed.

Joseph Campbell tells us that myths contain one or more of the following four functions:  Metaphysical, Cosmological, Sociological, and Pedagogical.  Each function describes the purpose of the myth and its connection to us.  We as humans are always searching for a reason for our existence, or how to explain something we do not fully understand.  This method of myth building still holds true today, even in our world of science and exploration into the unknowns.   We as humans have not changed, only our method of sharing the myth has.

For thousands of years, myths were created and shared via our voices.  They were passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth.  As each generation passes down the myth, aspects of the story can become exaggerated and new symbols added to the myth.  This method of story telling created many of the myths we know of today.  While the method of telling the story may have changed, the story itself remains.  In our modern culture, we use movies and games to develop and expand our nature of wanting more, our nature of creating something for which we have no explanation.  We use our storyboards to describe the shape of the universe and to lead us through a journey of mystical phenomena.  Whether it is from alien robots that come to earth to protect us from an evil robot faction, or an invasion of a human colony on world Reach, the fascination of myth telling is still as popular as it was a hundred years ago.

Myths are not dead.  The world we live in is no longer new and our awareness of our surroundings has increased.  We investigate and explore the unknown and will create hypotheses on what we cannot explain.  At first glance this may look as if our world is void of modern day myths, but if you look closely, you will see new myths created everyday.  The movies we watch and the games we play are our new voices in the world of myth telling.  We can create and develop any world, event, structure, and God(s) in our movie and gaming environments.  Thus continuing our fascination with story telling and the creation of myths.