Page 107 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

96 Articulating culture in the media age

unobtrusive measure of the capacities of symbols, discourses, and other
resources to be put to work in meaning-making.
As a heuristic device, these narratives should in a way “hold constant”
the structural location and purpose of the field material through which
they are seen. They can provide a touchpoint in the midst of the complex
and potentially contradictory material that naturally appears in such inter-
views, asking the question, “What was this informant interested in saying
or willing to say in the context of our interview, and what does that
mean?” They should thus allow interpretation of complex and contradic-
tory relations of at least two kinds. First, there are the complex, subtle,
and contradictory negotiations between what Habermas called the “life-
world” and “system world,” or between the material sphere and the more
sensaic, sentimental, and emotional realm Raymond Williams called the
“structure of feeling.” How does media culture contribute to these contra-
dictions and potential coherences, as expressed in informant narratives?
Second, there are the negotiations that are more central to our overall
quest here, those surrounding religion, spirituality, effervescence, “the
sacred,” enchantment, everyday and exceptional ritualization, the non-
rational, and the ludic. And again, the question is, how does media culture
relate to these issues?

What might we expect?

We ended the last chapter by reviewing what we might expect in the way
of specific, religiously/spiritually inflected uses of media. As we begin
thinking about these “plausible narratives of the self,” in the broader
context of overall media use and media behavior, we should also back
away a bit and consider some of the elements of media experience in
general that might impinge on the lives we will encounter through our
interviews. There are, simply, a number of things we might wish to assume
but that we probably should not assume. For example, we will learn a
good deal about the way people relate to and consume media in the
context of daily life. We have already seen that there is good reason to see
media as integrated into life in some fundamental ways. While people
might wish to adopt “accounts of media” that distance media from what
they seem to value at the center of their lives, at the same time, they seem
not to be able to do without media, and thus the media are, in Gauntlett
and Hill’s term, “settled.” We might wish to think of media in a way that
is discontinuous with daily life, but there is reason to doubt that this is a
very helpful direction to take.
Another assumption we might make but about which we should prob-
ably withhold judgment is the question of the continuous or discontinuous
nature of daily life in relation to media. It has been claimed by some to be
a “flow,” into which media experience and media behaviors intrude to a