"The title Media Rituals suggests a ready-made area of media research that is there to be explained and ordered. In fact, the position is more complex. There is a lot of talk about media in ritual terms, and there are a number of things that happen in relation to media that can properly be called ‘ritual’ which are the subject of this book. But we need to be critical of the assumptions about social ‘order’, and the media’s supposed place within it, that underlie much talk of media rituals. I will be developing an antiromantic approach both to media rituals and to the wider media process." (Preface)