Page 130 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Media 113

This focused way of thinking about media as instruments began to
change in the latter part of the twentieth century, for a number of reasons.
Sustained and unresolved debate about the relationship between viewed
media violence and social violence in the United States in the 1960s and
1970s created a skepticism, even disillusionment in some, about the capacity
of scientific research alone to fully resolve and predict media effects, and
many researchers went looking for alternative ways of thinking about media
and human behavior. There was a growing appreciation of the fact that the
recognized mass media were just one part of a much wider process of social
mediation within which all humans are nurtured and the need for thinking
about media to include a broader understanding of mediated communication
became apparent. There was a growing awareness that media were not just
neutral channels for carrying information and messages but had their own
character that infused the message along with the overt content—media
had effects apart from those intended by the communicator that needed
consideration. Within this ferment, approaches in European media studies,
with a focus on such things as text and meaning, media and ideology, media
audiences and media as agents of cultural construction began to be taken up
across the Atlantic. This convergence of factors led to a broadening of the
concept of media that began to change how the relationship between media
and religion was understood.
This more cultural view moves away from a focus on specific effects of
individual media toward a view of the entire society or culture as a mediated
phenomenon to which all forms of media contributed. Within this view,
thinking about media and religion moves away from a narrowly focused
concern with how religious organizations use specific media and the effects
they achieve, to looking more broadly at religion as a mediated phenomenon
within the context of the wider culture of mediation.
The cultural approach is undergirded by a quite different worldview than
the modernist, scientific view. It sees various descriptions of reality not as
objective reflections of what exists but as constructed, mediated views that
carry with them the particular interests of those who hold them and that
contend with other constructions for social recognition and access to social
resourcing. Media are now understood not as individual instruments to be
studied on their own but as part of the dynamic of society itself, a mediated
reality comprising not just technological media of mass communication
but the total process of mediation of life. Given the interrelatedness of
these cultural processes, media should be understood not as instruments
carrying a fixed message but as sites where construction, negotiation, and
reconstruction of cultural meaning takes place in an ongoing process of
maintenance and change of cultural structures, relationships, meanings,
and values.