Page 228 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Representing outcomes 217

Interviewer: So you don’t have anything bookmarked on Islam or
Buddhism. . . .
Donna: I haven’t found any. I look around for ones that I like and that I
can understand, are clear enough for me to get.

This illustrates several capacities of the Web for information-seeking. 10
Where we might have concentrated on the idea that what people do there
is primarily to read and digest information, Donna illustrates that it is also
possible to “subscribe” to certain sites in a way, by holding them in a
bookmark folder as a kind of collection. Donna reports referring to those
on a fairly regular basis, keeping current, adding, and deleting. She also
seems to use the Web in relation to “interactions about” the media. She
reports that she has investigated things online that she has interacted with
others about, in a kind of integration between the online context and her
context of social relations. Interestingly, though, she is less catholic in her
online tastes than some might assume. Where the Web and Internet
provide a wide range of materials about a wide range of religious tradi-
tions, Donna stays closer to home. She looks online for information about
things that she’s talked with others about. She seems to say that sites from
non-Christian traditions are conceptually inaccessible, and so she avoids
them. She also stays close to home in her investigation of Mormonism. It is
almost a defensive strategy for her (something we have also heard from
other interviewees), to seek information she can use there to better under-
stand or even contest the ideas of a given religion.
We’ve looked at the ways people talk in terms of media experiences
being inspirational and moving, assuming that one of the basic meanings
of media materials would be in their abilities to serve such basic religious
purposes or meanings. We then moved to a different standpoint, that of
the capacity of the media to act as sources of information, something that
would be more distant or removed from the individual’s or family’s reli-
gious experience. Now let’s look at another possibility: that the media
might provide normative models of value and action, either through their
plots or through characters that embody such ideals. This, like the other
categories we’ve looked at already, is a common received assumption
about the way that the media might be involved in moral or religious life.
As we have talked with our interviewees, we’ve encountered a number of
examples of such modeling.

“I want to identify with it”
Television programs and other media can and do provide rich cultural
texts with which their audiences can come to identify. Not surprisingly,
few people we interviewed seemed to be willing to describe their relation-
ship to such things in terms of the media “affecting” them or the way they