Page 277 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

266 Conclusion: what is produced?

the presence of media in the home in the first place. This is the important
point here. It is commonplace to think of contemporary US cultural and
social life as “media saturated.” We all know how prominent media have
become in our lives, and the range of media available in the home
continues to grow exponentially. What is interesting here is that those
families who we would expect to be the “outliers” in terms of their rela-
tionship to the media seem instead to accept this reality almost tacitly. We
might ask, “What else are they to do?” Well, they could separate them-
1
selves, as others have done. By and large they do not. Instead, they seem
to accept the pervasiveness of media as a given, a “fact of life,” and they
proceed to negotiate with the situation. They do what John Thompson
(quoted earlier) suggests that people do with media: they treat their rela-
tionship to media as a mediation, an interaction of ideas and experiences
from media and ideas and experiences from daily life.
Further, they experience “the media” both as individual programs,
services, and experiences, and as a “package.” They understand on an
experiential level the fact of life at this point in the development of media
in the West – the concentration and cross-media interaction of these indus-
tries. On another level, however, they have a tendency to see “the media”
as a kind of monolithic force. They relate to individual programs individu-
ally, and often with a degree of personal pleasure or salience, but see “the
media” as a whole as a different matter.
This sense of the ubiquity and pervasiveness of media is consistent, as
we noted earlier, with ideas from David Gauntlett and Annette Hill, and
from Sonia Livingstone, among others, about the ways that the media are
now integrated into daily life. They are, in a way, a settled matter. No
matter what we might want to think about their implications or effects,
they are now an accepted part of domestic space, and have become, in a
way, “transparent,” to use Livingstone’s term. As I said earlier, there is a
sense in which the “accounts of media” we have encountered here are a
measure of this process of integration. I would argue that the fact that
such “accounts” still exist and hold sway – that they are in fact important
publicly shared normative ideas – is a measure of their as-yet-incomplete
integration. While we must accept on some level (as our interviewees
nearly universally do here) that the media are now part of the fabric of
daily, private, domestic (as well as public) life, we still lack the symbols
and language we need to describe their role in anything like the normative
terms that we use to describe the gemeinschaft of the idealized past. This is
significant, apparently, as the past and ideas and symbols from the past
play so prominently as our interviewees struggle to describe their ideals of
values, spirituality, faith, family life, and the inter-relationships between
these domains. The language of the past is powerful language, and the
vocabularies of the past have yet to have been successfully adapted to
incorporate the reality of the pervasive media.