ABSTRACT
The entertainment and electronic media (including the Internet, computers, and video games) is arguably the most pervasive force in American society today. It's almost incomprehensible impact continues to grow here at home as our more traditional political, social, civic, and religious institutions degrade and decay. Through the media, American culture invades other societies and infiltrates their cultures to an almost ridiculous degree. Nowadays it has become more important to know with whom the president has had sex than to know about the treaties he signs, the laws he enacts, or the bombs he drops. Organized religion, meanwhile, long the bedrock of American national life, has lost its once solid hold on many American families. Thus, as a society we have arrived at a point where the institutions that gave structure to daily life in times past have eroded severely, leaving a vacuum.
