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Conclusion: what is produced? 265

media and religion in the material spheres of cultural and social life. It has
been my argument that, to do so, we must look at things very concretely
and directly in the social sphere. Fortunately, a set of methods of social and
cultural analysis is available that has aided us in our inquiries. As we begin
to assess what we have found, we will discover that our findings are more
directly relevant to some questions than they are to others. Meanings,
consequences, or effects in the social spheres where we have been looking
will of course be the most directly implicated by what we have found. That
does not prevent us, though, from informed speculation about other
spheres as well. What follows, then, is a discussion of what we have seen
and heard in our inquiries. Some of what we will say directly addresses
issues and concerns that we considered as part of the justification for this
study. Other things – and they are some of the most provocative and
intriguing things we’ve found – emerge from the study itself.

The ubiquity of media
Across all the interviews and observations, from a variety of contexts and
perspectives (social, religious, ethnic, and otherwise), no other single thing
seems so universal as the sense of the ubiquity, pervasiveness, or inescapa-
bility of the media. From household to household and interview to
interview, all share in common an assumption – even an expectation – that
the media are universal and “taken for granted.” They are the lingua
franca and the common ground of contemporary social and cultural expe-
rience and practice. Numerous previous studies have arrived at the same
conclusion, showing, among other things, that the media condition the
structuration and tempo of daily life, and the norms, languages, and
contexts of social and cultural discourse.
The pervasiveness of media is, further, something that is often reflex-
ively engaged in the accounts we have seen. For an example, in Chapter 7
Jan Van Gelder lamented the power and pressure that the media seem to
exert on her home life, in spite of hers being a family that has taken
concrete steps to limit their role. Across our interviews, parents have felt
this pervasiveness and ubiquity most keenly. The media, including televi-
sion, film, popular music, and – increasingly – personal media and
hand-held devices, are at the center of youth culture today, and their influ-
ence seems to stretch across a range of social domains, from the
structuring of time, to the provision of common cultural idioms and the
topics of conversation through which broader social discourse takes place.
What is most significant to our explorations here is that the media are
also pervasive in the homes of those who – for religious or other reasons –
we might have expected to exercise the most “control” over them. In fact,
in such homes (the Millikens in Chapter 6, for example) what is distinct is
their sense that they have to do something about the media, not the fact of