Andrew P. Lyons

The television and the shrine: Towards a theoretical model for the study of mass communications in Nigeria 1

The context in which the new mass media are produced, distributed, and consumed in Nigeria differs as radically from the everyday world of the “developed” nations as it does from traditional Nigerian societies of a century ago. Many sociologists of mass communication have failed to address the issue of cultural difference in their accounts of media and their role in the third world. It is suggested that Webers concepts of “enchantment” and “rationalization” should both be re‐examined if one wishes to better understand a world in which television and the ancestral shrine exist in both spatial and ideological proximity to one another.