Page 242 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Representing outcomes 231

cartoons, if you don’t take them to heart [laughs] you know, but
they’re not kids’ cartoons. A lot of cartoons are not.

There is a struggle here that we’ve seen before. David seems to be pulled
between his own attraction to a range of film and television, “experiences
in,” and his sense, as a parent, that there are troubling things found there
(an “account of”). Like most of the parents we’ve interviewed, David feels
strongly that his most basic role as a parent in this regard is to help his
children come to the place where they can make their own judgments
about the media they consume. The media do provide opportunities for
object lessons, discussions, and interactions. Importantly, it seems to be
these opportunities for interpretation and understanding that can turn
what might be thought of as negative media to positive media. Good can
be found in anything, David and others contend, and it seems to be the
parents’ role to find those nuggets and highlight them. This is of course
rooted in the widely shared idea that the appropriate role for parents vis-à-
vis media is to help children come to make their own (appropriate)
choices. As we have seen, it is much more common to encounter “peda-
gogical” as opposed to “prophylactic” approaches to media and parenting
among our interviewees. By this I mean that most of the individuals we’ve
interviewed place a premium on being seen to make their own choices
about media, both in terms of what they watch, and the kinds of conclu-
sions and lessons they draw. Few want to be thought of as someone who
cannot make their own judgments about media or who cannot control
media in their own lives. At the same time, they want to think of their chil-
dren in the same way, particularly as they develop to young adulthood.
Therefore, few of them want to be seen to be “protecting” their children
(particularly older children and teens) from “bad media.” Instead, they
want to be thought of – and for their children to be thought of – as indi-
viduals who can make their own autonomous choices.
It remains intriguing that we have found it to be so difficult for most
interviewees to make direct connections between their media lives and
their values lives. That is compounded in this chapter by the relative infre-
quency of easy connections between media and religious or spiritual lives.
In spite of what we might have thought (and many others have said) there
is little evidence in our interviews of direct religious, or religious-like, func-
tions and effects of media. If the media sphere is able to provide
opportunities for religious or spiritual inspiration in a way that is homolo-
gous to, or even replaces (much less contests), conventional practice, we
would have expected to find much more direct evidence of this in our
interviews. More importantly, we would have seen the ways that this is
made possible in media culture. By expanding this to look at a range of
possible functions or effects of media, from inspiration to identity-
building, we might have hoped to have found the media coming to provide