Page 135 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

118 Peter Horsfield

particular media industries serve particular ideologies that may support or
challenge religious ideologies? In what ways do the economic structures and
requirements of media industries require religious institutions to restructure
to participate in them? How do the professional ideologies and work
practices of those who work in the media affect other social institutions and
practices that engage with them, such as religion? How have sociopolitical
factors such as ownership of media technologies, access to media, and power
centers created by media industries shaped the culture and distribution of
power within religious institutions?

Media as text

According to the trope of media as text, the only way we can make sense
of the world is through the use of language, and language can operate only
through texts of mediation. A major approach to thinking about media,
therefore, has been through the theorization and study of texts and textual
practice. In a discursive approach, this involves more than just deciphering
overt content. In its broadest use, a media text is any signifying structure
that uses cultural signs and codes to convey or evoke shared meaning. In
these broader terms, religious understanding and practice can be sustained
only in texts, so an important aspect of understanding the relationship of
media and religion involves the study of texts and textual practices in the
construction and communication of religious meaning. This meaning is not
an objective thing waiting to be discovered and explained. It is constructed
socially through the agency of signs, not in an arbitrary or naturalistic way
but within traditions of textual practice involving groups and individuals
cooperating and competing to build shared and divergent understanding.
This process is a constantly moving one, involving the full gamut of textual

practice such as codes, myths, discourses, genres, intertextuality, symbolic
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capital, and the life of the text in circulation.
Though the instrumental view of media emphasized the power that the
medium gives to the producer or the one who controls the instrument,
the textual approach views media power in a more distributive way.
Understandings, positions, and relationships in a media situation are
neither fixed nor simple. Studies of how audiences receive and use media
within the textual tradition see audiences as active agents in the process
of communication and in the construction of meaning, not just as passive
recipients. For some, this more fluid view of communication as a negotiated
outcome between production and reception means that we have to change
our concept of “media” away from just the physical artefact (such as a book,
radio, or television) and see media instead as the physical and mental space
of interaction between the person producing the message within a particular