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46 Media and religion in transition

only in a restricted range of contexts and discourses. What is far more
significant is the notion that, in important ways, they are open and avail-
able beyond a restricted audience. Of course there are private media, but
the media we will talk about here derive a major part of their significance
from the fact that they are public and open. Negotiations over who is part
of the discussion, who is watching, who is asking, and who has access
become important questions as audiences negotiate themselves into and
out of participation in various media, but they all rely on the fundamental
characteristic or assumption of “public-ness.”
This public-ness is also rooted in the characteristic that originally made
the mass media “mass” – that their political economy relies on as broad an
audience as can be assembled, something that today is still of great
concern to the advertisers who support most of these media. The label
“democratic,” first applied to the mass press over a century ago, now
seems quaint to us but obscures a more ideological assumption: that these
media, open to “the masses,” were necessarily something for lower-class
taste cultures, and would reflect that class location in their content and
consumption. This remains a matter of interest today. The changes in the
media have allowed a demographic and class–taste targeting of electronic
media, something that was less possible before, but the questions of which
media are available to which audiences, which are “appropriate” taste
cultures and which are not, and questions of the relationship between the
assumed “quality” of various media and the national, ethnic, and social
classes typical of their audiences remain matters of meaning-making and
negotiation. 2
Some other characteristics of what we once thought of as the “mass
media” also continue to be important. Their instantaneity or timeliness is
also significant. The mass-media era accustomed us to the notion that
much of what we encountered in the media was at least intended to be
consumed with a known “sell-by date.” It had a sense of its time, even
though we have become accustomed to consuming media at our leisure,
collecting and re-consuming films and television programs years after their
original release, and enjoying nostalgic re-consumption on channels and in
places intended for that purpose. The timeliness of news programming is
taken for granted for most audiences.
Another significant characteristic of the media has to do with their
origins or sources. Traditional definitions of the mass media highlighted
the characteristic of their being “one to many,” that is that there was a
centralized source attended to by a larger audience. This bears much in
common with the notion of their being public. But this is contested today
on a number of fronts, while it remains an important issue. It is contested
because a variety of audience practices and technological arrangements
today present themselves as being “interactive” or “bottom up.” It is
common to think of the Internet in this way, for example, and the adver-