Page 131 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

114 Peter Horsfield

In recent years, therefore, scholarly interest in media and religion has
shifted away from understanding how religious groups use media, how
media represent religion, or how the values of media and religious bodies
intersect to questions of religion as a mediated phenomenon. The theological
view of religion as a separate realm of knowledge and practice governed by
its own criteria, or the institutional view of religion defined by authorized
religious bodies, are challenged by this approach. Religion is more accurately
understood as a social construction that originates, develops, and adapts itself
through the same mediated processes of creation, conflict, and negotiation
within itself and in relation to its wider environment that all of life participates
in. The study of media and religion, therefore, needs to be broadened to
include the messy, diverse, and at times contradictory individual and group
practices of mediated daily life to which religious meanings are ascribed.
Key questions now become not how does religion use media but how are
media and religion interrelated? How is what we know as religion constructed,
shaped, practiced, and transformed by the different media practices within
which it is embodied? Though the dominant agents of religion within any
society—such as religious leaders, religious institutions, and organized belief
and practice systems—are important to study, the more discursive view sees
these identifiable manifestations of religion as just some of the players in a
much broader game of social religious mediation that includes many other
players, playing to quite different sets of rules that need to be deciphered
and correlated.
This is not to say that the instrumental paradigm is no longer used
in research on media and religion. As with other areas of media study,
particularly in marketing and advertising applications, the view of media as
instruments for carrying particular messages and the testing and measurement
of the effectiveness of specific uses of media to achieve particular outcomes in
religious marketing, promotion, and institution building are still widely used.
The strength of the discursive way of thinking about media and religion,
however, is that it more realistically considers the complexity of religious
practice and mediation processes within any social or cultural situation and
how such media uses construct the character of religion as religion adapts
itself to them. The weakness is that with such a broad view of social mediation
and of religion, its rich description can be so diffuse as to be of little strategic
or policy value. In practice, however, one can see a number of key tropes of
media reoccurring in this approach.

Media as culture
The trope of media as culture presents the understanding of medium as the
ecology within which organisms grow. We become who we are through