Page 13 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

2 Introduction

their leaders for attention and influence. The marketplace today assumes a
determinative role in social and cultural life. Shared, mediated experiences
come to define the terms and outlines of social and political discourse.
Through such trends, culture increasingly functions with a kind of
autonomy that is in many ways unprecedented. At the same time, practices
of religion are changing, with individuals assuming more responsibility for
the direction of their own spiritual quests. Through their “seeking,” the
influence and legitimacy of formal religions of all kinds has increasingly
come into question. The power of legitimation is more and more in the
hands of the seeker as she looks to a wider and wider range of sources and
contexts – beyond the traditional ones – for religious or spiritual insight.
This has all served to center the media in these trends and in our under-
standing of them.
A range of observers have contemplated the evolving relations between
religion and media. Some have lamented the seeming influence of the
media on the more “traditional” and “authentic” forms of religious
expression and practice. Others have decried the seeming influence of reli-
gious interests in and through the media. Still others have criticized what
they see as the “anti-religion bias” of the media. Meanwhile, religion is
more and more an object of journalistic scrutiny as religious interests,
movements, and individuals have gained a higher profile in contemporary
political and social life.
What has been missing from most of the public discourse has been a
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focus on the role of the reception and meaning-making by media audiences
in these trends. Among those who have reflected on the intersection
between media and religion is the Korean American video artist Nam June
Paik, who has produced several iterations of works that introduce a statue
of the Buddha into a conversation about visualization, representation, and
reception. In two of these, a Buddha contemplates a video camera and a
monitor that displays the image seen by the camera – the Buddha himself .
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The circularity of the metaphor can be seen either as “closed” or as “open.”
A “closed” interpretation would center the solipsism of “a religion”
focusing on itself through the allure of technology. An “open” interpreta-
tion would center on the sense that the dharma – the “teaching” – is
idealized and re-presented via the technology, opening the question of
which is more “real,” the teaching or the image, and the question of whether
the representation of the teaching is more or less authentic than the
teaching itself. Inserting technology into religion, as Paik’s work represents,
raises for us a fascinating set of questions about whether representing and
receiving tradition in this way somehow fundamentally alters the nature of
religion and religious practice. Paik could be read as pointing out that the
technology in fact focuses the issue on the fundamental level of the act of
seeing, and the way that seeing is the authentic act, not the representation.
Thus, rather than threatening tradition by “technologizing” it, or turning