Page 24 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

What this book could be about 13

immense economic and cultural influence at the same time that an
increasing array of services, channels, and media devices are available. The
effect of this in the context of daily “lived lives” is an increasing commodi-
fication of experience through these media. The media are themselves –
and they produce – commodities. The symbols and ideas that circulate
domestically and globally are mediated, commodified symbols and ideas.
Culture is increasingly a material culture, and the media are both
producers of it and produced by it.
This means that one way the media age is significant for religion is in
the nature of that “media culture.” The media today constitute the inven-
tory of symbols, values, and ideas out of which sense is made locally and
globally. That material is not something that is idiosyncratically produced
by the media (as some would want to claim) but is very much derived from
the cultures in which the various media are situated. When I say that the
media are produced by culture, that is in part what I mean. The media
traffic in the symbols, values, and ideas of their culture(s). The fact that
those things become mediated means that they are changed in fundamental
ways, certainly, but the integration of the media in and through culture
cannot be ignored.
The media can be seen as a source of attractive and salient symbols. The
inventory of symbols they provide are in some ways the “raw materials”
out of which ideas and values are exchanged in contemporary life. While
the media may not originate those symbols, they do reproduce and circu-
late them, under conditions that are defined by economic, social, and
political arrangements. There is thus a certain valence or momentum to
these commodified and mediated symbols derived from their provenance
in the media sphere. But, as they are experienced in the context of daily
lived lives, these mediated symbols have a certain concrete significance and
a certain place. They are used in certain ways. For a project interested in
the prospects of religion in such an age, the nature of that inventory of
symbols, and questions of who uses them and how, become fundamental.
It is worth speculating, further, on the extent to which such mediated
symbols might be specifically put to the purposes of contemporary reli-
gious practice. I will discuss this in more detail in later chapters, but it is
almost a commonplace to say that things are in the media because they
“work” on some fundamental level. Commercial, commodified media
depend on finding material and ways of articulating it that will be attrac-
tive, compelling, and absorbing. There is an increasing tendency for the
media to explore a range of sensorial contexts as well. Film and television
are often described as the “visual” media and there has been much specu-
lation about the extent to which they have created or changed the “visual
culture” or led to increasing “visual literacy” in audiences. The rise of the
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digital media (the Internet, “web,” and personal digital technologies) has
extended the range of visual experience, but increasingly auditory experience,