Page 103 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

92 Articulating culture in the media age

Ricoeur further contended that there is an element of reflexive self-evalu-
ation in the way we make senses of ourselves. We do this by telling
ourselves stories about our lives. These identities are fluid and mobile, not
fixed, and continue to be woven over time. They also involve others, with
our individual stories also bound up with stories of our families and others
in our lives. Each element of our identity narratives – including the other
participants, elements, and experiences – comes from a particular place and
time, and thus these do not float freely, but are culturally, historically, and
experientially grounded. Our narratives are thus not “fictive.” Ricoeur also
contends that these narratives necessarily have a normative dimension.
They are about values, and are evaluative. We say, through our narratives
of self, not only who we are but also who and what we want to be. 26
The way I will use the term narrative here is consistent with Ricoeur’s
conception. Narratives are a process whereby we weave together some-
times disparate, contingent elements of life into a story that at least
aspires to coherence. Identity narratives are the stories we tell ourselves
and tell about ourselves. They involve a variety of elements, including life
experience, symbolic resources, and (most importantly to Ricoeur) other
persons and our relationships with and to them. They have a normative
or value-laden dimension, in that they tell about who we are in terms of
what we aspire to be. We want to describe ourselves in terms of what we
value. At the same time they are necessarily grounded, because on some
level they involve real persons, real experiences, real languages, texts, and
symbols.

Narratives as a research tool
The interviews we will examine here resulted from a long-term study of
religion and meaning in the media age. I have described the approach of
this research as interpretive and constructivist. We have been interested in
understanding how people make meanings in the media age, and how the
symbolic resources of the media sphere relate to those meanings that are
oriented to faith, spirituality, religion, and transcendent meaning. The
interviews are in-depth and based on semi-structured interview agendas.
They are thus intended to have some consistency across time and across
interviews, but also are flexible to account for new information and new
experiences. This flexibility results from an ongoing interpretive process
whereby the interviewers meet regularly with the whole research team to
discuss what we are finding. 27
It probably goes without saying that a good deal of care and delibera-
tion is necessary because it is not really possible to just “go and ask”
people what they do with media that is religiously or spiritually significant.
As we will see, the responses we get are complex and elusive. What we
have already seen about the contrast between the various “levels of