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Media and religion in transition 47

tising and marketing industries have talked for years now about a shift
from “push” to “pull” marketing, where the Internet and the general self-
oriented social consciousness of today’s consumers has them, rather than
the advertiser or the marketer, in the “driver’s seat.” And, as we will see in
later chapters, there is much about contemporary media consumption that
thinks of itself as interactive and self-generating. 3
At the same time, though, we should not lose sight of the fact that the
mass media are complex and capital-intensive industries, and that they are,
in fact, centrally organized and function according to centralized and
centralizing logics. They are, as a prominent literary theorist has labeled
them, “consciousness industries,” devoted to the production of cultural
4
artifacts intended to shape consciousness, if for no other reasons than
economic ones. Their economic logic moves toward centralization, even
monopoly, with fewer and fewer corporations now controlling more and
5
more of the media landscape. The artifacts they produce are systematic
representations. An impressive scholarly enterprise has been directed at
revealing the nature of these representations, and has made a convincing
case that there are clear ideological themes identifiable in them. Thus,
6
while we might want to move away from the too-facile assumption that
the media are monolithic processes responsible for the ideological subjuga-
tion of undifferentiated masses, it would also be incorrect to say that the
processes of media production, representation, and consumption operate
in a totally free and unfettered way. The truth is somewhere in between,
and it is the task of contemporary media studies to work toward more
complex interpretations at that boundary.
We look at the media differently today in part because of changes in
their technologies, structures, and patterns of consumption. The decline of
the era of “dominant” media has by definition coincided with the emer-
gence of a multiplicity of sources. In magazine publishing, for example,
there has been an explosion in new titles over the past few decades. In the
face of widespread predictions of the end of magazines as a consequence of
television and other new media, what has occurred instead is a diversifica-
tion, with an increasing number of titles, each directed at smaller and
narrower “niche” markets.
The same phenomenon has occurred in television. Cable and satellite tele-
vision have produced a multiplicity of channels and services unthinkable in
the “network” era. These range from those directed at relatively large,
heterogeneous interests (in news, for example) to those focusing on relatively
narrow interests or demographics. And within these channels, it now makes
economic sense, in a way it did not before, to present individual programs
with very discretely focused interests. The diversification unleashed by cable
television has also influenced the development of new over-the-air networks. 7
In both the US and the UK, television companies targeting smaller markets
and taste cultures are surviving and even flourishing.