Page 31 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

14 Introduction

Judging from the traffic that has traveled the intersection of disciplines,
questions, and studies, the list of key words that comprises the book captures
much of the energy and focus. The following remarks attempt to sketch out
the conceptual field by clustering several of the terms into smaller groups.
Gathered together for critical definition here, I hope they push the
discourse on media and religion to recognize more formally the most
influential implications of recent work. The terms have been selected to
represent the emergent network of ideas that have shaped investigation
over the last three decades. Each of the authors has written within a matrix
of ideas, artifacts, institutions, and practices that joins them to a larger
framework. For example, one of the threads connecting several words
(audiences, circulation, public, community) is the power that media practices
have demonstrated time and again to create social forms of association.
So in writing about audiences, Stewart Hoover considers the history of
the treatment of mass media, the eclipse of traditional religious authority,
the importance of the marketplace, and the emerging prominence of
audiences as powerful agents rather than passive consumers. A significant
consequence of these changes has been that scholars have come to focus on
the meaning-making activities of media practices. Likewise, in discussing
circulation, Johanna Sumiala examines ways in which the mass-mediated
framing of images creates relationships between them and viewers. These
relations inflect the reception of images, suggesting that scholars train their
attention on the circulation and reception of media artifacts to learn how
mediated events take on meaning.
Reflection on the social, cultural, and political functions of print and
broadcast media has been importantly concerned with the formation
of different publics, the public sphere, and public opinion. Joyce Smith
examines the mediated construction of publics, asking how they are
imagined, disseminated, consumed, contradicted. Where and how do media
publics happen? Riffing on Jürgen Habermas’s enormously influential study
of the role of eighteenth-century coffee shops in forming the public sphere,
Smith suggests that mediated publics today arise in the savory taste of coffee
and the leisurely privacy of wifi connections. All of the analyses described
so far unfold in dialogue with J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu’s discussion of
the community-forming effects of media consumption. He shows how this
applies to face-to-face and urban—but also transnational—communities for
whom media maintain an extended set of associations as religious groups
take shape in the global flows of immigrants.
A second set of terms (text, narrative, technology, economy) responds to
traditional approaches to the study of media and religion to show how it has
changed. Thus, texts are not stable entities, drawing from abiding genres
that provide clear meanings but, as Isabel Hofmeyr shows, are social events,