Page 108 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Articulating culture in the media age 97

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greater or lesser extent and with positive or negative consequences. Since
I have argued that it is problematic to think of interviews such as ours as
evidence of behavior or practice per se, we will not be drawing many
conclusions about how media relate to the flow of daily life. However, we
will be able to draw some inferences about how our informants think
about these questions, and therefore about the capacities of media practice
to relate in transparent or opaque ways to daily life.
Another larger question relates to a matter we discussed in Chapters 2
and 3: how optimistic or pessimistic to be about the reflexivity and self-
consciousness of contemporary life, and the extent to which media culture
contributes to these conditions. As we noted there, observers such as
Kenneth Gergen have suggested that the cultural and conceptual suffusion
of contemporary life – in which the media are centrally implicated – so
overwhelms contemporary consciousness that the “self” has little room to
maneuver. Gergen puts it this way:

we are now bombarded with ever-increasing intensity by the images
and actions of others; our range of social participation is expanding
exponentially. As we absorb the views, values, and visions of others,
and live out the multiple plots in which we are enmeshed, we enter a
postmodern consciousness. It is a world in which we no longer experi-
ence a secure sense of self, and in which doubt is increasingly placed
on the very assumption of a bounded identity with palpable attributes.
What are the consequences? How are we to respond to the coming
conditions? 33

As we saw there, other observers follow the influential lead of Anthony
Giddens, who holds that there is reason to suspect that this condition leads
to a sense of cultural autonomy in the crafting of the self as readily as it
leads to anomie. The difference may reside in how identity and self are
conceptualized. Giddens, for example, holds that the self and identity
are fluid rather than fixed, and are in the hands of individual social actors
in a more or less constant process of construction and reconstruction.

Self-identity . . . is not something that is just given, as a result of the
continuities of the individual’s action-system, but something that has
to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the
individual. . . . Self-identity is not a distinctive trait, or even a collec-
tion of traits, possessed by the individual. It is the self as reflexively
understood by the person in terms of her or his biography. 34

To Giddens, then, something very much like our plausible narratives of the
self are at the core of the creation and maintenance of the self and identity.
The question of whether we are to see these processes as evidence of the