Page 129 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

112 Peter Horsfield

the communicator were achieved (such as change in attitudes, voting for a
particular politician, or buying a particular product).
This narrowly focused view of media and the communication process
has been and continues to be an influential one, for a number of reasons. It
corresponds to a common pragmatic way of thinking about how the world
works and our part in it: things that happen are caused by something that
makes them happen—in turn, we can make things happen by finding out
what causes them to happen and doing that ourselves. The perception of
scientific methodologies as objective lent an aura of impartiality to research
findings around media effect that belied their particular focus and limitations.
The approach also has an adaptable simplicity. Forget about complex media
theory: communication is simply a process, media are just tools—learn how
they work, adopt the right techniques, and you can make things work to
your own advantage. Studying media by focusing on individual media as
instruments of effect also avoided involving researchers and institutions in
the politically loaded critical issues of things like media power, ownership,
and social functions.
Though many aspects and limitations of the approach have been questioned
in recent decades, the hermeneutical power and practical applications of
this focused way of thinking about media have made it an enduring way
of thinking about media, particularly in areas such as policy making and
strategic media planning to the present time, leading Denis McQuail to call
it “the dominant paradigm” in media theory (McQuail 1994).
This approach has been the most common framework for scholarly
research into media and religion until recently, particularly in the United
States. That research has focused on a number of main issues: describing
and tracking religious interactions with media; critical comparisons of media
content and values from the perspective of religious content and values; and
studies of the effects of religious uses of media, looking at such things as
audiences of religious programs, uses of religious programs by audiences,
effectiveness of religious programs in such things as evangelism and attitude
change, and strategies of various religious uses of media.
These studies into media and religion reflect a number of unquestioned
assumptions about what media are, what religion is, and how the two are
related. Religion is seen as a separate domain of human experience from
that of media and the media world. Religious meaning was generated and
governed primarily by religious people according to their own distinctive
religious criteria and principles. Media were simply instruments or channels
for carrying this religiously determined message to the intended audience.
Whether a religious communication was effective was evaluated by the extent
to which the changes in behavior intended by the communicator happened
or not.