Page 101 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

90 Articulating culture in the media age

television – even when they only have daytime TV for company – we
can see that these respondents are well able to “cope” with whatever
guilt their viewing may bring, and in fact would be most reluctant to
part with their TVs. 17

To these people, television is a “guilty pleasure,” but it is more than that.
As Gauntlett and Hill, Ellen Seiter, and our studies in Media, Home, and
Family showed, television and the other media are integrated into the warp
and woof of daily life in a way that is both pleasurable and unsettling, both
isolating and connecting, both trivial and deeply meaningful. The point is
that it is there, it is “settled” and integrated, and people have found ways of
living their lives with it, around it, through it, and without it.
Our inquiries into the particular role that media play depend then on
accounts from informants that have a purpose for them. They are a certain
kind of talk. They are directed at the larger project of the creation of the
ideal self, inflected with a reflexivity about their social location and about
societal and cultural sources of the self. Their motive is to make a partic-
ular kind of self-presentation. That “accounts of media” fit so tacitly into
such self-presentations means that they are integrated into ideal and
normative ideals of self, the self that informants want to present in a
particular setting and to a particular listener. They are meant for publica-
tion, in a way, and the meanings and knowledge we derive from them
must take account of the settings in which they were derived. Thus the
method we must use is itself a reflexive method. We understand where we
are and who they are, and who they think is asking.
It remains, though, to describe the nature of the presentations they
18
make. I would like to propose that we think of them as narratives. In the
context of an inquiry into religious and spiritual meaning, values, and
symbols, the sense that these are narratives enables us to connect them
with the larger project of the family and of normative ideals. Wade Clark
Roof describes the role of such narratives in this way:

Put into narrative terms, families are the settings where great stories
embodying trust, respect, love, honesty, integrity, fairness, responsibility,
and other values are shared and practiced. Here children first learn what
it means to belong and to be loyal, to relate to others, to share in ritual
practices, to celebrate the values of families and loved ones, all crucial to
personal identity and social life. Here parents not only teach moral
virtues and faith but model them, setting examples that children may
follow. We might even go so far as to assert that the link between
parents and children rests to a considerable extent on storytelling itself. 19

There is, of course, a growing body of social research based on narrative.
There are two broad approaches, one more psychologically and clinically