One way to frame today's contention between religion and the media is in terms of Jihad vs. McWorld.  While the media are central to the forces of McWorld, few things are more literally Jihad-like than, say, the wave of Islamic fundamentalism that is currently sweeping so much of the world.  This is very visibly a struggle over culture, and the ways in which people are to be connected to one another in society.

In the West, where concerns about the structure of the social order are less immediately apparent than in the Islamic world, the more prominent feature of the media-religion conflict is a struggle over how we define that aspect of our lives in which we transcend the more mundane circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Neither aspect of this conflict, however, is ultimately confined to any particular area of the globe.  And to understand what is happening in Western society, it may  be more helpful to begin with a fresh look at what is happening in other areas of the world.