Page 137 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

120 Peter Horsfield

Changed perspectives on the nature of text and textual practice open a
range of new possibilities for rethinking the interaction of media and religion.
How do texts function and exercise power in the construction and mediation
of religious ideas, practices, and institutional life; how do texts function in
the creation or restriction of diversity in religious ideas and experience; how
do texts and textual practice contribute to the building of religious coherence
and identity; where does authority lie in the interpretation of texts and what
are the implications of reader reception theory for religious authority; how
are religious texts performed and in what ways is their performance part of
their meaning construction?

Media as technologies
The concept of media as technologies looks at media technologies, not
just as neutral carriers of content but as having particular physical, social,
and technological characteristics that become an integral part of the
communication. One of the earliest to propose this perspective was the
Canadian economist, Harold Innis, in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Innis
1950; 1951). Innis’s ideas were developed and popularized by his colleague
at the University of Toronto, Marshall McLuhan.
The focus on media as technologies challenged the dominant instrumental
thinking of the time which, it was argued, missed the vital issue of the
technological and sensory characteristics of the medium and the way the
medium itself structured communication and influenced the society. The
form of a medium massages the communication by favoring particular kinds
of messages over others and by adding particular sensory preferences to the
content. All communication, therefore, needs to be understood as “content-
in-form” and, when push comes to shove, McLuhan argued, the form of a
communication is of greater importance than the content, summed up in his
adage, “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964).
McLuhan proposed that technologies of communication work by
addressing and extending particular human senses and functions. In
the process, the perceptions and understandings that are linked to those
senses are affected. When new technologies are developed and adopted
within a society, therefore, they create broad new sensory experiences and
consciousness, in the process changing the existing balance of sensory use
and experience. These changes are subtle ones—changes in perceptual habits
and ways of thinking brought by new forms of communication are massaged
into a culture rather than dramatically imposed. The consequence, though, is
that different mediations of phenomena create different perceptions of those
phenomena within people, without the people necessarily being aware that
their perceptions are different.