Page 138 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Media 121

There are many criticisms, even scorn, of this approach to thinking about
media. However, the trope of media as technologies has been important
in breaking the dominance of the instrumentalist view for thinking about
media. Its insights have been developed through more extended and
nuanced explorations into the interaction of technology and society and the
materiality of communication practice. Meyrowitz, for example, develops
the concept of medium theory further by examining how different media
lead to social changes on a macroscale by constructing fundamentally
different patterns in the formation of group identity, socialization and social
hierarchy (Meyrowitz 1994).
Without falling into a simple deterministic mindset, the trope provokes
different questions in thinking about media and religion. Compare three
religious contexts: exchanging religious ideas on an Internet-based network;
participating in a megachurch with flashing lights, loud amplified music, and
multiple visual projections; and sitting in a small rural church where voice is
unamplified and singing is accompanied by a small organ or piano. In what
ways do the presence and availability of particular media forms stimulate
particular types of religious perception and practice compared to differently
mediated religion, and what are the social consequences of that? In what
ways do the sensory characteristics of the media by which communication
takes place shape perception and legitimize particular religious forms over

others, and what are the social and political consequences of that? In what
ways do particular media stimulate or require particular forms of social
relationships and structures to be established or changed, and what are the
consequences for religion of that? What are the relative contributions made
in the construction of meaning by the content of a communication and

the form of its mediation? David Morgan, for example, suggests there is a
difference between those types of media or forms of communication in which
the content of the communication and the form of the communication are
clearly distinguishable and others wherein the distinction between the two
is blurred or deliberately blended. He argues that any mediation that makes
one aware of its material nature transforms the mode of representation from
a discursive one to a figurative one, engaging different tools of analysis.
“When the medium materializes, when it begins to perform rather than
defer, we become aware of it rather than through it…Meaning is ‘in, with
and under’ the physical elements of the medium” (Morgan 1998a: 4–5). In
what ways do particular media forms establish organizational patterns or
hierarchies in the social ordering of religious phenomena and perceptions of
religious power and authority?