Page 259 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

248 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

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troubled patriotism,” she notes. As Haas’s analysis demonstrates, objects
have the capacity to carry complex meanings and associations, connecting
with the malleability of meaning-making we considered earlier. Miles
Richardson suggests that the reason for this is that objects have a perma-
nence that words lack. “In all cases, the objects left are more powerful
than the words that their givers might have spoken . . . [they] continue to
speak . . . long after we are gone,” he observes. 43
The September 11 events thus occurred in a historical trajectory
defined by prior mediatization of commemoration and mourning, by
prior experience with a similar event of victimization and loss, and by an
evolving set of practices that Linenthal calls a “memorial vocabulary,”
including the sending or leaving of objects including cards, poems,
flowers, and stuffed toys, particularly teddy bears. Linenthal further notes
the interesting phenomenon experienced at Oklahoma City as well as at
Columbine, the tendency for certain people to develop a “presumed inti-
macy” with victims and their families. It is inescapable that this sense of
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intimacy is related in some way to the mediated experience of the events.
Linenthal and Foote also note the emergence of a kind of “democratiza-
tion” of such events as individuals are able to come to their own ideas
about how best to participate, and are motivated by the mediated close-
ness of the events to do so.
In late modernity, such democratic practice necessarily involves indi-
vidual autonomy and personal initiative. Gillis connects this rather
self-consciously to the media age.
We are more likely to do our “memory work” at times and places of
our own choosing. Whereas there was once “a time and a place for
everything,” the distinctions between different kinds of times and
places seem to be collapsing. As global markets work around the clock
and the speed of communications shrinks our sense of distance, there
is both more memory work to do and less time and space to do it in.
As the world implodes on us, we feel an even greater pressure as indi-
viduals to record, preserve, and collect. 45

This addresses concerns such as those we attributed to Kenneth Gergen in
Chapter 2. Gergen holds that in modernity the self has become “satu-
rated,” with limited prospects for constructive or redemptive action.
Gergen sees the kind of practices we’re considering here, where people act
in concrete ways to participate in collective experience, as one source of
optimism about modernity.

The capacity to give life to words, and thus to transform culture, is
usefully traced not to internal resources but to relatedness – which
serves as the source of all articulation and simultaneously remains