Page 55 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

38 Stewart M. Hoover

of whether the media constitute a substantive sphere of religious practice
(whether they become a kind of religion or function as a civil religion or
replace religion, for example) is an empirical one that would direct inquiry
toward such fields of activity.
Carey and his interpreters have joined the discourse on the side of the
“active” audience. His model, focusing as it does on the way that media are
consumed, experienced, and exist within the cultures to which they relate
implies that the focus should be on audience practice. It is important to
note that, though such paradigmatic conceptions of the role of media in late
modern cultural life point to practices and consumption that might have a
kind of normative status (they might constitute the imagined “object” such
as religious practice), there is a wider field of conceptualization involved. It
is important to make a distinction between intention and function in this
regard. Regardless of what is intended by certain mediated texts and genres,
what matters is what results from these expressions and their consumption.
Thus, the question of who the audiences are and what they do becomes the
central one.
Defining things in this more expansive way takes account of both the
empirical-methodological issue of what to study and how to do it and the
more theoretical question of how emerging modes of religious and spiritual
practice are finding particular and enhanced expression in a media sphere
that is evolving to accommodate, even encourage, them.

Audiences in context

There is a question about whether what we have been calling the audience
for religion or spirituality can be thought of as distinct within the overall
media landscape. This is important because of the long-standing patterns
and practices whereby media audiences are made. There is both a historical
and contemporaneous dimension to this. Historically, the emergence of the
electronic media was far from tacit or unproblematic. Significant efforts
were necessary to integrate media into the warp and woof of daily life.
Contemporaneously, media audiences find in their practices significant
points of identity and meaning, serving to provide stable “sources of the
self.” Along these dimensions, audiences are “made,” they do not just evolve
through some natural means.
As the new media objects and devices of the twentieth century were
introduced into the domestic sphere, they were not necessarily easily or
tacitly accepted there. Though it is true that each new medium has in a
way been built on what went before, in a process of imbrication (Morgan
2007), some technologies have been more problematic than others and have
required a degree of negotiation. Early phonographs intended for the home,