They call it the “UCLA Bubble,” and I’ve been stuck in it for the entire time attending this school (minus my year abroad in Europe, of course). For my last few weeks living here in Los Angeles, I’ve made a point of it to explore this urban sprawl. With no finals, fraternities or UCLA Marching Band halftime shows, this young grad has finally popped out of the campus bubble and has begun to explore LA. This comes right before I plan to live and work in San Francisco (Silicon Valley). Each of these areas of California owns its distinct cultures—its own way of communicating. LA has film and San Francisco has technology, and in the words of the communications extraordinaire Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message.” How LA and SF speak to the world defines its cultures, and I’m pretty excited to jump from one culture to the other.

Yes, the LA economy runs on more than the movie industry, but Los Angeles chases after this medium of communication like some Film Noir love affair. Los Angelenos love the spectacle. They idolize the story. And they put on quite the show.

As I explored LA, curiosity brought me to the behemoth Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—or, the Mormon church—that occupies an entire LA block on Santa Monica Blvd. Within its steel gates I discovered the visitor’s center. This was not your humble visitor’s center with pamphlets and smiling nuns. The mormons created an epic, high-production-value exhibition where you could interact, watch and learn about Mormonism. When I entered one exhibit gallery of the visitor’s center, a larger-than-life size Jesus statue gazed down upon me and began to preach his holy sermon over Bose loudspeakers. In fact, they even had a theater where I watched a 23-minute film entitled Treasure in Heaven: The John Tanner Story about the valiant Mormon named John who converted to the Church, healed his wounded leg and emancipated himself from his crutches in similar fanfare and style to when young Forrest Gump loses his metal legs in his eponymous, Academy Award-winning film.

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Pictures from the Mormon Church

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The Mormon visitor’s center gave me one of those knock-in-the-head, ah-hah moments. I realized that the Mormons of LA really know their customers: Los Angelenos. They know how to appeal to this town, and LA prides itself on its filmographic past. Relics of grand movie houses still stand vacant on lonely street corners of the city. Star map and celebrity-watching tour booths dot Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles loves a good movie. In fact, I came down to study film in tinseltown and UCLA for that reason. For the longest time I wanted to be a film producer. But after learning about the possibilities of technology and digital storytelling, I’ve come to embrace my decision to venture up to the Silicon Valley—the tech center of the world.

Sure, I’m young, naïve and still full of unrealistic optimism, but I think that San Francisco and the Silicon Valley hold a lot of promise. What film brings to LA, technology brings to SF. Technology embodies its medium of communication, and with that comes a phenomenal culture. Here we have companies who connect with people all over the world on a genuine level. Now, that isn’t to say that LA and film cannot be real—just ask my WWII vet Grandfather about Saving Private Ryan; he’ll vehemently argue that the opening scene of Spielberg’s film accurately depicts the hells of war.

I just believe that technology has an ability to shrink distances so much more closely to the point that we can get just a tad more real and genuine with each other. Twitter disrupts dictatorships, Pinterest inspires your inner artist and Google Docs helps you share your grandma’s famous pork dumpling recipe.

This Thursday I will travel up to northern California knowing I’ll enter a culture where technology frees our communication and gets us all to connect on big and real terms. I’m out of the UCLA bubble now, and that’s exciting.