Page 56 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Audiences 39

for example, were marketed as fine furniture (Siefert 1994) as were early
radios (Smulyan 1994) and television sets (Spigel 1992), and the content
of each of these was directed at emerging class and taste sensibilities. Early
phonograph recordings tended toward the classical, and much of early radio
was also addressed to bourgeois aspirations in the moral and cultural spheres.
Audiences were further cultivated by formats and genres intended to locate
these media at the center of the culture. During the great depression and
the two world wars, film theaters presented the newsreels through which
American and European audiences experienced the wars and radio flourished
as more expensive entertainments were less available.
By the 1950s, national media audiences had been well established, with a
range of conventions and routines that firmly lodged them in the context of
daily life. Thus, it came to be the case that the media were domesticated, and
the domestic sphere mediated (Spigel 1992). Thus, audiences in the twentieth
century revealed both acceptance and resistance, a seeming contradiction
that continues to underlie public attitudes about the media today (Hoover
2006; Hoover et al. 2004).

Religion, spirituality, and the “common culture”

Audiences are self-conscious about their practices, and this self-consciousness
plays an important role in modern identity formation. Simply put, we are
today well prepared to describe ourselves in terms of the media we consume
and in terms of the kinds of media we reject or consume as a “guilty pleasure.”
These reflexive self-descriptions are in a way a function or a result of the
processes whereby the media have been “domesticated” and the domestic
“mediated.” There is a sense in which this project is incomplete. Narratives of
media in private life are far from tacit but carry specific and focused critiques
of the media, critiques that are often religiously inflected. These critiques are
complexly and incompletely related to behavior, and it is this contrast that is
evidence of the extent to which the media are not fully domesticated,” and
the domestic sphere is not comfortably mediated.
It is a widely shared stereotype that religious people tend to be the
most prudish or moralistic about media culture. Experience has led public
discourse to expect that the more religious the audience, the more likely
they are to find fault with entertainment television, popular film, popular
music, and other popular arts. These critiques serve the issue of identity in
that such viewers are also likely to think of their view of media as important
to describing who they are, that is, “...I am the sort of person who finds
such-and-such program objectionable....” Popular discourse around the film
The Passion of the Christ in 2004 clearly revealed these connections between
media preference and identity, as many, many conservative Christians