Page 49 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

32 Stewart M. Hoover

has involved a shift in the way in which media scholars and critics characterize
those audiences. Instead of regarding “religious audiences,” whose identities
and motivations toward religious or spiritual material would be assumed to
reside in an essential, definitive religiosity, it has become important to think
of the audience for religion (or spirituality). This moves the focus away from
the presumed nature of the audience to the observed nature of the practice
and as a consequence opens up to scrutiny a wider range of phenomena,
media, and audiences.

Media change and religious change

More and more, the media are diverse and interconnected structurally,
economically, and thematically. There are obvious differences and less obvious
similarities between them, particularly when we consider their audiences.
The print media of newspapers, magazines, books, and pamphlets and the
screen media of television and film are prominent and obvious in these
considerations and are what come to mind when “the media” are invoked
in public discourse. However, radio broadcasting has had a long history
as a platform for religion, particularly in the United States. These more
traditional media are now joined by emerging settings and platforms which
share affinities of context, taste, and consumption with their predecessors.
Popular music has always been important in religious expression but now
constitutes a distinct medium through its economic and material force in
the media marketplace and its interactions with other media platforms and
contexts, including radio and its increasingly important—and profitable—
live performances. These other media are also increasingly interrelated with
a larger range of products of visual and material culture, many of which
constitute the elastic and growing symbolic and iconographic inventory of
contemporary religion and spirituality. Finally, and most prodigiously, the
emerging media of the digital realm, the Internet, the Web, digital downloads
such as podcasts, interactive media, user-generated content, and the range
of emergent platforms now appear to be important—even determinative—
contexts for the development of contemporary media cultures (Brasher
2004; Campbell 2005).
There is a historical trajectory to these media and an implied view of
these audiences that are important to articulate. Audiences for the earlier
media were treated as more passive and perhaps reactive than audiences
for the more recent media have been, particularly those of digital media.
For example, advertisers distinguish between the so-called “push” media of
television and radio as being displaced by the “pull” media of the digital age.
Some media are thought to be able to carry information and messages that
directly motivate behavior (they can “push” audiences) and other media that