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276 Conclusion: what is produced?

already noted the tendency for people here to think of the media as some-
thing that they simply “do.” Their mode of practice in this “doing” seems
to follow its own logics, not the sort of cognitive, deliberative course that
we might have wanted or expected.

Children and autonomy
Another matter of negotiation emerges when we look at how people in our
interviews thought of themselves as parents and the appropriate relation-
12
ship between media and religion/spirituality in relation to children. As we
noted in Chapter 7, many of those households we might expect to take the
most moralistic stance toward media, the “born-agains” and “dogma-
tists,” did not universally do so. Born-again believers, in particular, tended
to shy away from the sense that it was up to them to protect their children
from “bad” media. Even Glenn Donegal, who we declared a “dogmatist,”
expressed the view we might call “pedagogical” as opposed to “prophy-
lactic” when it comes to media and children. “We want them to know that
life is full of choices,” Karl Callahan said in Chapter 6. The notion that
parenting should be about helping children make autonomous media
choices on their own fits with the overall theme of autonomous choice
we’ve seen develop throughout these interviews. It makes sense that adults
who feel autonomous and empowered to make their own decisions and
draw their own conclusions would see their role as helping their children
develop the same skills.
We might have expected such a view from the “mainstream believers”
and “metaphysical seekers” among our interviews, due to received
assumptions about the relationship between social class and ideas about
parenting. We might also then have expected our more “conservative”
parents to be more moralistic and controlling with their children. Instead,
nearly all of our parents here, across Roof’s categories, expressed an
“account of media” that the proper role of parents vis-à-vis media is to
equip their children with the skills and values they need to make their own
choices, not attempt to protect them from things they should not see. This
was true even for parents who otherwise expressed the most moralistic
“accounts of media.” It seems that, in the context of the ubiquitous
“common culture” of the media, where few parents have chosen to avoid
media altogether, most have concluded that the appropriate response is to
prepare their children to interact with it, rather than attempt to avoid it.

Social class
We have not, to this point, discussed questions of social class in any detail.
While issues of class and class interests underlie a good deal of culturalist
media studies, I’ve argued for an approach here that looks beyond ques-