Page 58 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Audiences 41

or spirituality as important dimensions of their lives are particular audiences
within these landscapes. In general, though, spirituality and religiosity seem
to relate more to the reflexive identity questions than they do to actual
audience behaviors (Hoover 2006).
This distinction between belief and behavior among audiences obviously
complicates the study of media audiences and the study of media audiences
in relation to religion and spirituality in particular. Much empirical work
depends on various kinds of self-report of media behavior, and these reports
tend to be unreliable as precise measures of actual behavior. The point is not
that people are inconsistent, which is widely known. The more profound
issue is the question of how and why such audience identities are formed
and maintained and what purposes they serve. Though much remains to be
done on this, the outlines of it are becoming clear, as we have seen, and some
more insights will do so with further investigation.
As I said before, there is a way that the media serve as a kind of “cultural
center” of society, a gathering place for the representation of a common
conversation that spreads across contexts and localities. This is a function
that is lodged in historical circumstances in the mid-twentieth century, and
this common culture and “the media” can be said to have evolved together
in such a way that there exists within both the media and media audiences
a rather firm and stable expectation that among the genres, structures, and
functions of the various media will be those media and those moments where
this sense of centrality is important. It is expressed, of course, at moments
of crisis such as the 9/11 and 7/7 events. It is also expressed in significant
moments of cultural ritual, such as major sporting events and political
campaigns. However, it also aggregates around purely “media” events of
celebrity and charisma. For audiences, it is important on some level to be
able to be part of a common conversation about these things, and there are
important cultural currencies that attach to the ability to be conversant in
the common culture. This is particularly important for young people, but it
is a cultural affinity that other generations share. And, there are “common
cultural” resources for these subcultures as well. Youth want to be part of the
common discourse about popular music, for example. Women are aware of,
and attracted to, a common discourse about “women’s issues.” And, equally
important, there are media devoted to these tastes and interests (motivated
in part by their economic logics and economies of scale).
The history of the audience for religion provides a certain structural
dimension to this picture that is significant. As we saw earlier, there have
been continuing efforts for most of the last century for religious particularism
to develop its own media. The “radio preachers” of rural America are
an example of this, as are the Billy Graham organization’s film projects
(Hendershot 2004). More recently, specifically religious productions and