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Public religious culture post-09/11/01 239

Our knowledge of “them” and their knowledge of “us”
The afternoon of September 11, 2001 was a regularly scheduled lecture
day in an introductory course in mass media and society. Like many of my
colleagues, I chose to offer the 200-odd students in the class an opportu-
nity to process the events of the morning, and opened the floor for
questions, responses, and discussion. One of the first questions asked was,
“Why didn’t we know someone hated us that much?” Other students
chimed in with similar wonder that we could have been so blind to such
sentiments about the US. Implicit in these questions was the assumption
that, in a modern, mediated world, saturated with journalism, we should
be more knowledgeable about “others” out there, and their attitudes
about “us.” This was compounded in subsequent days by the growing
sense that immigration, globalization, and global social and cultural
change was making it ever more important to know about the rest of the
world, to try to understand it, and (in the case of the US foreign policy
establishment, at least) to try to project a more favorable impression of the
US to the rest of the world.
These discourses are rooted in one of the most significant functions of
media in modernity: their role in transcending geography, bringing once
vastly separated individuals, groups, and communities into closer contact
with one another. Marshall McLuhan’s widely noted aphorism that the
media age would usher in a “global village” is now thought to be over-
drawn and overly optimistic. The media do have the capacity to cross
space and erase time, and, as geography becomes less of a barrier, we do
increasingly know more about the “others” from whom we are separated
by great distances. The instantaneity of the electronic media has made it
possible for us to know much more about events across the world as they
happen, and to have a contemporaneous grasp of events abroad. The visu-
ality of the electronic media has added a sense of credulity to this
knowledge, as pictures are taken to be more real and credible than oral or
written accounts. 11
Whereas McLuhan is taken to have expected that this mediated connec-
tion would bind disparate communities and peoples closer together, things
don’t seem to work quite that way. There is evidence, for instance, that
increasing knowledge about others can lead as readily to mistrust and
misunderstanding as to trust and understanding. A major reason for this
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has to do with the context and framing of reception of media messages. In
a classic international and cross-cultural study, Tamar Liebes and Elihu
Katz showed that viewers of the 1980s US soap opera Dallas read the
show in ways that were more dependent on those viewers’ own contexts
and life situations than on the central themes and messages of the
program. Viewers can and do make new meanings out of the things they
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view from “other” contexts, meanings that are as dependent on their own
situations as on the manifest values or messages in those media materials. 14