Think of society as a system, and approach the social sxiences as systems sciences -- psychology, sociology, economics, political science. They have state, observation, processing logic, interaction, and some new state -- a basic control loop or OODA loop.

That's the basic premise of Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics https://www.worldcat.org/title/cybernetics-or-control-and-co... and The Human Use of Human Beings https://www.worldcat.org/title/human-use-of-human-beings-cyb... -- horrible title, great book), Alfed Kuhn, The study of society : a multidisciplinary approach https://www.worldcat.org/title/study-of-society-a-multidisci...), Jay Forrester, and others.

Media are the informational element of that loop. Change it, and you change behaviour.

So, no, media don't merely reflect society, any more than a mirror merely reflects a person's image. In the first place, mirrors change behaviour. In the second, media are far more than a mirror -- they adapt, transform, store, play back, transmit (in both space and time), amplify and attenuate, information. They reveal state; they express will, control, and narrative; they create and propogate shared (and novel) models of understanding; any they apply to both human and mechanical systems (as well as, arguably, nonhuman biological systems).

The key point is that if you change the informational component of a system, you change its behaviour fundamentally.

Its range, bandwidth, latency, scale, topology (peer-to-peer, star/broadcast, web/mesh), fidelity, recording and playback capabilities, modalities (symbols, icons, text, pictures, sound, video, data, ...), search, association, fungibility (modifiability / rewritability of content), and more.

That's the basic message of Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message and Gutenberg's Galaxy), of Elisabeth Eisenstein (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change), and others.