Page 16 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Introduction 5

along the way. In order to look at audience practice it was necessary to go
to where that practice is taking place – the domestic sphere of the house-
hold and the context of the various types and kinds of families that exist
there. In order to understand those practices in their context, it was necessary
to make the point of the research interventions a kind of collaboration
between researcher and interviewee that did not assume a determinative
role for any one element, but assumed interactions between elements in
context.
This work also cannot stand completely alone, because it emerges from
a larger set of collaborative research efforts focused on meaning-making in
the media age. In the process of these inquiries, it became clear that, in
order to lay the groundwork for a study such as this one focused on ques-
tions of religion and spirituality, it would be necessary first to make a
more basic and general account of the processes and practices of media
experience in domestic, household, and family life. A previous book,
5
Media, Home, and Family, addressed this background, and is referred to
at key points in these pages. Beginning with a more general account was
necessitated in part by a major learning from the early stages of this
research. Alongside the expressed realization that qualitative and interpre-
tive methods were most appropriate to the questions under study stands
the realization that the processes and practices whereby people express,
represent, and take account of their media experiences are complex and
nuanced. In particular, that book lays out a description of the way that
expressed “levels of engagement” with media are an important dimension
of the meanings made.
Some readers will find that this book does not move in directions they
expect. I attempt in the first chapter to describe why this might be the case
and the way that this book differs from others. What is most significant
about this project is its focus on practices and outcomes of media
consumption, and its attempt to bring social theory and analysis to bear
on those issues. This focus has determined both the research approach and
the range of questions and issues that could be addressed. As will be seen,
this study does provide an important set of understandings about the
nature of religiously and spiritually inflected media practice, and about the
capacities of the media (and of religion and spirituality, too, for that
matter) to support certain kinds of meanings and actions. The last chapter
of this book draws together some of the larger implications of this work
and projects how these learnings might help in other important questions
and directions. A book like this simply cannot address all questions. It is a
focused piece of social science research that attempts to bring to bear crit-
ical and focused theoretical and methodological resources on the central
locations of relations between media and religion – the places where
people actually interact with, and use, media resources in religious and
spiritual ways.