Page 216 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Chapter 8

Representing outcomes

One of the persistent ideas about the way media and religion relate to one
another is rooted in broader social conceptions of the power and influence
of “the media” on social life. Much more common than ideas of how reli-
gion might be influencing media are ideas about how influence might flow
1
in the opposite direction. A good deal of the discourse in this direction has
lamented potential negative impacts of an irreligious “secular” media on
religious belief and behavior. As I have said, our explorations in this book
are a way of testing such ideas, and in this chapter we’ll address questions
of how media might be leading to religious outcomes or being used in reli-
gious ways or ways that bear a resemblance to religion. 2
In Chapter 3 we reviewed a diverse set of ways that the relationship
between religion and media has been conceived. These included essen-
tialist, archetypal, formal, realist, transformationist, and other approaches.
The notion of “effect” or “outcome” of media exposure is implicit in
many of these views, relying on an assumption that the media are able to
compel action or to engage or articulate beliefs, symbols, or ideas in
powerful ways. It should be clear from our discussions to this point that
the paradigm here does not assume “function” or “effect,” but instead has
found more evidence of, and insight into, how individuals interact with,
and use, media to represent themselves and their lives. This holds in
reserve questions of outcome or effect, wishing to lodge questions of
outcome in a complex and nuanced understanding of the preconditions of
where, when, and how interactions with media occur and meanings are
made. And, as we have seen, there is a good deal of distance between
“text” and “reception.” One of the most significant aspects of this
distance is the ways that people position themselves and their lives vis-à-vis
media, the “accounts of media” we have seen in these interviews. But we
are able to explore beyond these accounts to ways that people’s “experi-
ences in” and “interactions about” media are also significant in their lives.
We’ve seen how our interviewees’ “narratives of self” relate media and
religion/spirituality in some fundamental ways. Certain media seem to
form an important basis for participation in culture and society. There is a
kind of expectation that, to be part of the culture, we need to be involved