Page 133 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

116 Peter Horsfield

or through correspondence of their religious media preferences with the
dominant cultures of mediation within the broader culture. The structure
of theological education that evolved in Western Christianity during the
Modern period, for example, is more than just a functional way of preparing
people for the practicalities of pastoral work. The cultural practices of
theological education—the adoption of university classroom practices
(lectures and seminars, for example), linking pastoral education with
extensive libraries, the testing of people for pastoral ministry by requiring
them to read books and write academic essays, the awarding of degrees—all
positioned the leadership of modern Christianity within a literate, book-
based culture that was aligned with the elite literate culture of developed
Western nations but often at odds with the practical daily culture of lay
Christians. That media culture of Christian leadership is being significantly
challenged by the media culture of digital technologies within which the new
generations are nurtured. Thinking about media from a cultural perspective
prompts a number of questions. What are the authorized and unauthorized
views within any religious tradition and in what ways are those views
associated with or embodied in particular media practices? In what ways are
established power structures and practices within a religion challenged by
their adaptation into other cultures of mediation? In what ways do people
within or outside particular religious traditions adapt aspects of the mediated
religious language, practices, or symbols in their own processes of religious
meaning making?

Media as industries

The most common use of the term media today is as a collective term for the
constellation of institutions, practices, economic structures, and aesthetic
styles of social utilities such as newspapers, movies, radio, book publishers,
television, and the related creative industries (such as advertising, marketing,
and graphic design) that service them.
Because every form of mediated communication is a social activity, every
medium requires a supporting social infrastructure to function. You cannot
write and send a letter to someone, for example, unless you have materials
to write with, unless there is a way for the letter to get there, and unless
the person you are writing to knows how to read or has access to someone
who does. Every new medium, therefore, must develop a supporting social
infrastructure or industry before it can function as an effective social medium.
This industrial infrastructure includes a common language, language forms
or literacies appropriate to the new medium; a means of education or
induction to pass on those literacies to new generations; a steady and reliable
supply of materials and technologies needed by the medium (e.g., sheepskin,