Page 40 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

From medium to meaning 29

dominant media of the nineteenth century were beholden to other organiza-
tions: in the case of Britain and the US, to governments, political parties,
social organizations, and institutions, including religiously motivated ones.
With advertising, media could become independent of those ties, while it of
course can and should be argued that advertising support itself carries with
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it certain obligations and expectations. A perhaps more important conse-
quence (and significant to our discussions here) of the integration of
advertising into mass media is the fact that all aspects of the media over the
course of the twentieth century became increasingly commodified, and the
boundary between non-media “commodities” and media images, programs,
icons, content, and services became increasingly blurred.
In the case of American broadcasting, for example, traditions of “public
service” and other obligations of broadcasting gave way, by the end of the
century, to an orientation toward “markets” and “marketplace forces.” 13
Product cross-promotion in children’s television programming, the
increasing practice of “product placement” in film and television, and the
cross-promotion of films, television, and popular music are all examples of
this blurring of traditional boundaries. The media have become integrated
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into – and are in many ways the basis of – the larger economic project of
the creation, marketing, and consumption of cultural commodities.
The turn of the twentieth century, though, witnessed the adolescence
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(and some of the excesses) of an emergent mass-media sphere. Emerging
along with the media were a set of social ideas and social understandings
of their force, effect, and significance. As the media rose to prominence in
new ways as the century progressed, they were increasingly identified with
technologies and with technological developments. The telephone, the
motion picture, the record-player, the radio, the “dime novel,” and later
television – the devices themselves – came to embody whatever social and
cultural transformation was being wrought by their development. It is not
surprising, then, that the focus of popular – and later scientific – discourse
was in the first instance on “the medium” itself, or rather on “the media”
themselves. There were some distinct strains to this discourse. On the
popular level, public discourse came to know the media in terms of their
assumed “power” or influence. Radio came to broad public attention
during the Titanic disaster of 1917. For the first time, radio played a role
in bringing news of a major event to the public. The public imagination
was also captured by the 1937 War of the Worlds broadcast, where radio
was thought to have led to widespread panic and mayhem through its
power to lead and mislead.

The evolution of media research and theory
More serious and scholarly consideration of these emerging media came in
several different – though related – forms. A significant school of thought,