Page 26 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Introduction 9

within the bounds of a medium, which condenses time, combines distinct
perspectives, expands the experience of presence, and fuses a diversity of
contents into a singular field of vision, fashioning a coherent narrative that
brings the event to the viewer. Such live events as the funerals of world
leaders, presidential inaugurations, papal elections, state ceremonies, or the
Olympic Games are retold as “a primordial story about current affairs,”
resulting in mediated events “that hang a halo over the television set and
transform the viewing experience” (ibid.). Media events are fashioned from
ritual occasions and therefore exhibit several features: they are live and they
are “presented with reverence and ceremony” (336). The awe and aura
endow the events with a rhetorical stature that invites a reverent response
from viewers and presumes to address them in the uniform and heady
tropes of nation, polis, people, world, Christendom, humanity, and so forth,
seamlessly extending the bounds of community to the mediated space of the
televised rite. Though Dayan and Katz have been criticized for endorsing a
myth of the center, a center that does not in fact exist, the criticism fails to
recognize the power of myth. States, nations, and peoples commonly rely on
such a story to cast a spell of unity, to generate a magnetic field that enables
a polity to celebrate its coherence, its imagined community. 11
A group of media researchers examining and comparing media uses in
several demographically different American homes has shown that some
groups within American society imagine themselves “at the heart” of the
culture, whereas others perceive themselves as off-center or at the periphery,
which they believe is a better place to be (Hoover et al. 2004: 103–29 and
79–101). In both cases, media help them do so. An evangelical Christian
family selected media for home use that affirmed, in effect, its participation
in “a new cultural mainstream in U.S. society,” the neoevangelical subculture,
which often fondly asserts that America is a Christian nation (103). Contrarily,
American Muslim parents in another case study attempted to secure their
family’s religious and cultural difference from the American mainstream by
establishing rules against listening to popular music and strictly limiting the
amount of time spent each week watching television or playing video and
computer games. Naturally, the children found ways to break or stretch the
rules (91).
The investigation of media practices as formations of consciousness
allows scholars to understand better the many ways in which experiencing
media structures thought and feeling. This is important for several reasons.
First, we can learn more about the mentalités or encompassing cognitive and
aesthetic patterns that media help to construct and maintain by drawing and
reinforcing definitive boundaries such as inside and outside, us and them,
center and periphery, top and bottom, frontline and rearguard, first and
last, old and new. These structures confer fundamental aspects of social