Page 100 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Articulating culture in the media age 89

next room one night to ask that the television set be turned down. They
graciously obliged. The next day, I encountered the mother from next door
in the spa après-ski. In making small-talk, she said she was an ordained
Protestant minister. In learning that I research television, she responded, as
if by reflex, “You know what our approach to television is in our family?
We just don’t allow it.” In our book, Media, Home, and Family, 15 my
colleagues and I present a large number of such accounts from a range of
families and in a range of contexts. As we’ve proceeded, it has interested
us a great deal to learn how consistent such received ideas about the media
are, how deeply rooted they are, how they cut across class and cultural
lines, and how extensively articulated they are. The most interesting thing
about them to us initially was the curious phenomenon of the contrasts
between belief about the media – these expressed accounts – and media
behaviors, as with the skiing family next door.
While we might be tempted to begin an investigation of this
phenomenon as an example of the social-psychological phenomenon of
16
cognitive dissonance or an example of how people are poor informants of
their own behaviors, or to try to get behind their misleading talk to under-
stand what they “really” do, I think a better approach is to theorize this
phenomenon, to try to understand it. Why does it make sense for people to
say the things they do about the media, and, further, what is sensical about
the particular ways particular people choose to describe their media lives?
As my colleagues and I argued with regard to media, home, and family,
these self-presentations regarding media are important elements of overall
self-presentations, and thus are identity statements. And, as I said, we
found a great deal of consistency from interview to interview in the public
scripts people referred to in crafting their “accounts of media.” At the
same time, though, there were and are important variations, and it is in the
interpretation of these variations and their relation to the contexts of
specific lives and specific locations that we can learn important things
about how the media relate to identity and meaning.
Gauntlett and Hill describe this phenomenon in terms of the guilt that
the British television viewers in their study felt about their viewing lives.

We saw that the more television people watched, the more they were
likely to feel guilty for not doing other things, such as household
chores, homework, or socialising, or any number of other things that
people don’t do if they’re watching television. If we looked at the
responses about TV guilt in isolation, it would be easy to form the
impression that the British public is fundamentally uncomfortable
with watching television, and is somewhat annoyed that TV has come
to settle so easily into their living rooms and everyday lives. However,
taking into account the context in which these responses were written,
and looking at how much pleasure people get from watching