Page 32 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Introduction 15

emerging from use, endlessly redacted and circulating. Careful historical
study is able to demonstrate how each iteration is suited to particular
circumstances and negotiates social and cultural differences. As a dominant
structure in human communication and memory, narrative is one of the
primary occasions on which news media’s public constructs its sense of truth,
community, and value. Jolyon Mitchell investigates the role of narrative in
journalism, folklore, and the formation of national identity, focusing on the
dynamics of narration as the story of a Philippine national hero is retold
in word and image. Stories are framed and followed by journalists in the
form of various narratives and are rejected, championed, and redeployed by
consumers in rituals of communication. Through narrative, events and people
are assembled into powerful figures that are linked to myths, religious stories,
and other artistic forms in the forging of collective identity. Technology has
long been the fetish of social histories of media, adorned with narratives
of revolution as the primary trope in discourses on modernity, democracy,
and Western supremacy. However, Jeremy Stolow proposes that technology
needs very much to be reexamined within an approach that stresses practice,
community, and reception. This allows him to argue persuasively for
understanding religion as media, touching on perhaps the most fundamental
idea in the turn to the humanistic study of media and religion. This shift
allows for much greater attention to interpretations and uses of technology
in the life-worlds of consumers, which may then, in turn, be instructively
compared to ideologies and cultural myths about technological power and
promise.
The “power of media” thematic carries with it a strong temptation to
reduce media technologies to their commodity value, which is understood
commonly as their capacity to deliver corporate profit. A great deal of
mass communication research in the twentieth century was dedicated to
measuring the intended and unintended “effects” of such media as film,
advertising, public relations, and political propaganda—research that was
often funded and relied on by business and political interests. This highly
instrumentalist approach to media easily overlooks the culture of media
reception, which involves the religious significance of consuming media.
Production, circulation, and consumption of media form what may be
described as a cultural economy of media. David Chidester ponders this as a
religious phenomenon insofar as media reception performs such important
cultural work as crafting or reinforcing representations of world, home,
gender, race, self, clan, and enemy. All media come to people today as
commodities, making us consumers engaged in acts of exchange that do far
more than provide food or clothing. The culture of media practices may be
very helpfully described as a system exchange that relies on different forms
of belief, unbelief, and make-believe.