Page 134 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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marsh reeds, cotton or wood pulp paper for writing; printing presses, ink
and plenty of paper, roads for distribution, and sellers for selling for mass
print, and the like); a framework of protocols, legal regulations, and policy
structures for managing the integration of the new practices and new centers
of power into existing societies.
Without these industrial factors, no medium will become established as
a sustainable form of communication within a society. Once established,
however, the industry becomes a new center of power. Its new literacies
challenge established epistemologies, structures of language, and ways of
seeing the world. New communication practices challenge and change
existing social networks and structures built around old practices. Its new
leaders can displace old leaders whose power was based in old media practices.
Investigation into how media are organized and function as industries has
been an important area of study over the past five decades because of the
significant power that media have come to exercise in modern states.
The character of media as industries has significant implications for how
media and religion are conceptualized and studied. The ability of religious
bodies to communicate their message and perspectives to the wider society
is influenced significantly by the extent to which they can translate the
language and practices of the religion, constructed within particular media-
cultural contexts, into the required languages, industrial demands, and
cultures of the dominant media industries. Conversely, the development of
new languages and practices of new media can generate new expressions and
practices of religion.
The ability of religious bodies to adapt their message or practices to form
mutually beneficial relationships or economic alignments with developing
media industries has been a significant factor in some key shifts within
religion. As writers such as Edwards and Eisenstein have demonstrated, a
key factor in the development and impact of Martin Luther’s Reformation
within European Christianity in the early sixteenth century was Luther’s
alignment with the commercial printers of his time and his ability to
construct and communicate his reformed view of the Christian faith in a way
that corresponded to the commerce and production processes of publishing
(Edwards 1994, Eisenstein 1979). A similar case has been made for the
more recent ability of evangelical Christianity to adapt more readily to the
dramatic, commodified marketing requirements of electronic media (Clark
2007b, Horsfield 1984, Moore 1994). Part of this impact may include ways
in which changes in media industries affect social structures by changing the
preferences of social mediation in a way that privileges particular expressions
of religion rather than others.
Thinking of media as industries prompts a number of other questions in
the study of media and religion. In what ways do the signifying systems of