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Chapter 3

Media and religion in transition

In the last chapter I argued that, by the end of the twentieth century, the
world of the media was changing in significant ways. Whereas the century
began with the emergence of what we came to know as “the mass media,”
and the middle of the period saw the formation of those media into
centralized and dominant social and cultural forces, by the end, the whole
notion of those media being about “masses” was coming under question.
That “the media” are now well established as central to social and cultural
life is not in very much dispute. What is under review is the question of
how we are to look at them.
A variety of metaphors for the media have been proposed. Are they an
“environment”? a “vast wasteland”? the “fourth estate”? the “cultural
environment”? the “family hearth”? “Satanic”? “technologies of freedom”?
“technologies of domination or hegemony”? “the video altar”? Each of
these is rooted in the more universal, totalizing version of the media
typical of the mid-twentieth century. While I won’t propose any particular
new metaphor for media, it is important to understand a few things that
are significant issues of definition as we abandon the view of media as
primarily a “mass” phenomenon. Audiences are today smaller, more frac-
tured, more specialized, and more homogeneous than was the case in the
past, so the adjective “mass” seems no longer to apply. This is a matter of
significance meriting further consideration, though, as many would argue
that large, “mass” audiences continue to gather for many television
programs, which is true. What we have seen is a relative “de-massification”
of audiences, accompanied by a rethinking of our ideas about what the
significance of a mass audience would be, anyway. Several other character-
istics of the media today are also worth rethinking. 1

Changes in the media
It is true that even though the media are no longer “mass” media in quite
the way they once were, they still are, in fundamental ways, public. In fact,
the nature of their being “public” is probably also the most important
dimension of their “mass-ness”. The sheer size of media audiences matters