Page 126 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Reception of religion and media 115

Corrine: . . . you know, looking at what Sally and Brenna are going
through and, we might still get a TV at some point. . . . And they do
get TV on the weekends. So as far as the peers, “Hey did you see what
was on ER last night?” or whatever, you know, they are not totally
out of the loop.
Brenna: A lot of people ask “Hey, do you watch South Park?” [The inter-
viewer notes that she has mispronounced “South Park” and her
mother corrects her.]
Brenna: . . . I don’t even know what it is.
Corrine: Yeah, it must be a TV show.
Brenna: It’s a cartoon or something.
Corrine: Yes, that would be my guess.
Brenna: A lot of people at school know that I don’t have a TV and they’re
like “How can you manage without a TV?”
Interviewer: What do you say?
Brenna: I say, “It’s easy, I mean I’ve got lots of other stuff I can do, you
know?”

While the lack of a television set at home does not appear to be a big
problem for Brenna, her experience here illustrates the extent to which it
is really not possible any more to live a life without media, or at least
outside the reach of the media. Her family also shows that it requires very
concrete and conscious action to maintain a life without television today.
In nearly all cases, households without television are like the Paytons’:
they have made a clear decision to step outside it. And yet, they can’t
escape it completely. For Brenna and Sally, they can (and do) watch televi-
sion at their father’s house (Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman is Brenna’s
favorite show). But, more pressing for them is the fact that television
viewing is such a fundamental reality for Brenna’s social network at
school that she is seen as different because she is identified as someone
who doesn’t. Consistent with the level of engagement we have called
“interactions about media,” knowledge of current television (and presum-
ably other media) becomes a currency of social exchange for young
people of all ages.
Brenna is not alone. It is very common among these interviews to find
people saying, like Jill Fallon, whose family we’ll meet shortly, “people feel
sorry for you if you don’t have TV.” The Paytons and the Fallons are what
sociologists might call “outliers” in the landscape of media use, among the
relatively few families who, for whatever reason, do not participate in
media culture unproblematically but have chosen to separate themselves
from it or from aspects of it. And, in both of these cases, it’s not that they
have no television at all. The Payton girls watch TV at their father’s house,
and the Fallons are regular, and active, viewers of films on VCR, and have
a collection of nearly 200 of them.