Page 218 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Representing outcomes 207

assumed that there would be differences in media practices and beliefs
based on people’s expressed religiosity or spirituality. The assumption
there focused on the associations and identifications that might exist.
Here, we will turn things around, and look at those accounts where infor-
mants express ways that the media actually contribute something to their
senses of self, identity, or meaning. This approach is actually much more
like the traditional way that we’ve looked at media: in terms of its
“effects” on audiences. As I’ve said, such effects are only part (and in
many cases a relatively insignificant part) of the story. But there is always
the expectation in our thinking and talking about the media, that there
should be times and ways that the momentum is with the media. We’ll
explore those here, by proposing a set of categories of meaning, effect, or
function found in our interviews.
As discussions of the effects of media, particularly in relation to religion
and spirituality, have proceeded, a range of different ideas about how
media might affect religion and vice versa have emerged as central to
received “public scripts” in this area. The categories here are derived from
that discourse, and represent both our view as analysts and the view of
informants as they provide narratives of their own ideas and actions. This
interaction between the analytic and self-descriptive is understandable in
light of arguments I’ve made earlier about the nature of discourse about
the media. As ideas such as these have become part of a common language
regarding the media, they have become both the stuff of expert analysis
and the stuff of reflexive parenting and reflexive media “audiencing.” It
should not surprise us, then, to find within these narratives some of the
same ideas about media use and effect that have long been part of expert
opinion in the matter. Teachers, opinion writers, clerical voices, religious
educators, and media literacy educators have all spoken to the kinds of
uses and effects we’ve been considering in these pages.
The categories we look at here are derived from two sources. First, they
come from what we analysts might have expected from reviewing the liter-
ature on media and culture, and reflecting on questions of religion, faith,
and spirituality. Second, they also emerge from the interviews themselves
as we have asked people to reflect on their interactions with and around
media. From both of these directions, it made sense to look at the first of
the “levels of engagement” we discussed earlier in the book, the level we
call “experiences in the media.” Whereas the issues discussed in Chapters
5, 6, and 7 seemed to more readily invoke the discourses we call “accounts
of media,” much of what we will see here will be those moments when our
interviewees report more direct experiences with specific media texts. At
the same time, as we will see, these also invoke the other two levels, “inter-
actions about the media,” and “accounts of the media.” In most of the
narratives we look at, it is difficult to disentangle these levels, and they can
be seen to inter-relate and interact in important ways.