Page 54 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Audiences 37

synergies in the various markets, along with the increasing numbers of
sources, services, and channels, has led to an impression of diversity. In fact,
the diversity has become actual with the emergence of the digital media
marketplace, further deepening and extending the integration of media into
religious/spiritual seeking, and vice versa.

The culturalist turn in media studies
These changes militate in the direction of a new conception of medium,
the audience, and audience relationship to these media. The fields of media
and cultural studies have undergone a shift in focus as the media themselves
have changed. Culturalist media studies are rooted in conceptions of the
audience that shift the focus of scholarly inquiry from the “passive” to the
“active” conception of consumption. The earliest work focused on received
ideas about hierarchies of culture within media, critiquing them from the
perspective of their relation to class, class tastes, and the cultural capacities
of the classes presumed to make up “the mass audience.” Opening the door
to conceptions of the audience as active and to inquiry into audience tastes,
motivations, and meanings at the same time opens the way to consider a
range of tensions and contradictions within media culture. One of these
tensions is that which we have identified in relation to what we might call
“the establishment era” in religion and media. Just as culturalist scholars
have pointed out the extent to which the network and public interest models
of broadcasting defined and constrained audience subjectivities through their
genre and programming strategies, we have seen how this process worked
in relation to religion and spirituality. At the same time, though, there are
important and intriguing contrasts.
I noted earlier that the overall sensibility has seen a shift from medium to
audience as the focus of inquiry. This shift has been described as a change
from an “instrumentalist” or “effects” paradigm to one that stresses practices
of consumption by audiences. This has led to a broad range of inquiries
into various classes, means, and modes of audience practice. Provocative
studies of gender, families, youth cultures, politics and civic engagement,
commodification, and the political economies of various kinds of media
culture have resulted.
Work in the area of religion and spirituality was signaled for some in
James Carey’s (1975) call for the transformation of media research from
a “transportation” to a “ritual” paradigm. There has been a good deal of
discussion of the question of whether Carey meant his notion of ritual in
anything other than metaphoric terms (Rothenbuhler 1998). However, for
the present purpose, looking at the construction, practices, and meanings
among audiences, such a distinction is not of great concern. The question