Page 227 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

216 Representing outcomes

them because this is something that is happening to them. And, you
know, they’re being held by Muslim extremists and so, you know, it’s
just interesting how the media will portray them, the Muslim extrem-
ists. But yet I guess I get a bigger picture by checking on that kind of
news and seeing what’s going on as far as that. Because it’s more of a
religious issue than anything else. And so they don’t portray much of it
on the news. So, I can’t think of anything else . . . um, you know,
I’ve looked at different church sites and stuff like that. And I have
friends in Tennessee and Florida and they’ll have me look at different
sites and stuff.

Megan’s online information-seeking seems thus more closely related to her
own faith and religious exploration than Bill’s. The capacity of the Internet
and Web to provide a wide range of information, and to make it easily
accessible to searches, links, and forwards, seems to provide, for Megan at
least, an open field of exploration related to her own faith and religious
interests. Her favorite Christian station (which is not, incidentally,
connected with her own congregation) has a website and other links
through which she can connect to a wider network of information sources.
The Web is also a context she and distant friends can also share. Even so,
her information-seeking is only about information, a commodity that
supports, but does not determine, her faith. It is at some distance for her.
There is thus a way that the technology relates to a particular way of
thinking about the material which is sought out – in this case, information.
Megan moves from a radio station to its website to things linked from
there. The autonomy and self-direction implied by these practices is impor-
tant to her and to Bill, but exists within the limitations of the medium and
its protocols. Donna Baylor, Bill’s wife, illustrates this during a conversa-
tion about her use of the bookmarks in her Internet browser.

Interviewer: Are you going online often to search for things and book-
mark them? Or is this something – you have a folder that’s already
been created and you don’t add to it very often? You keep going back
to the same places?
Donna: Well, it depends. If I find something new, I’ll stick it in there – I’ve
cleaned it out a couple of times because some of the things that I had
found previously were gone, were not good anymore. I’d review it and
go through it every now and then and put in new things and take out
the old. You know, what’s relevant and what’s not. I have some
websites in there on different religions that I’ve looked at – if I’ve
gotten into a discussion with someone over. Well, I guess my big thing
would be Mormonism. Since I have in-laws and relatives that are
Mormon and Bill used to be a Mormon. I try and research that a lot
so that I have a lot of information to work with that way.