Page 275 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Chapter 10

Conclusion

What is produced?

We began this study of the relations between religion and the media
intending to address the ways that the media age has come to condition
the practice and meaning of religion in late modernity. From that rather
broad-sounding mandate, we narrowed our focus to what I argued was a
question prior to the many others that might have been asked. Before we
could look at the big picture of religious meaning, spiritual symbolism,
religious and spiritual traditions, religious institutions, religious education,
and the relationship of religion to national and global politics, it seemed to
me that we should first look at how people, as media consumers and
media audiences, access, interact with, and make sense of mediated reli-
gion. In this concluding chapter, I’d like to sum up the major things we’ve
found, and, in a tentative way, suggest some of the implications of what
we’ve found for these, and other, “larger” questions.
In part, this exploration has been based on narrowed expectations. To
get to the (presumably) “fundamental” level of actual media practice, we’ve
had to adjust our perspective away from the global to the local, and from
the broad spectrum of potential “effects” of media and religion on one
another to the more precise means, moments, and ways by which “the
media” become important or meaningful in religious and spiritual ways.
The reasons for this narrowing involve both the conceptual challenges of
defining when and where we think this might be happening, and the
methodological challenges of actually studying these interactions. For
reasons we discussed in detail in Chapter 4, we have moved to detailed
discussions with a range of individuals, families, and households, the fruits
of which I’ve presented in the previous four chapters. We’ve looked at those
accounts for evidence of the ways people are integrating media experience
into what I’ve called their “plausible narratives of the self,” conceiving of
the question of identity as being an important marker of the relationships
we’re interested in. These “narratives,” as I’ve said, have not been the goal
of our inquiries, but instead part of the “raw material,” or data, out of
which we have developed evidence of the relations we are interested in.
As a fundamentally sociological project, our study has wanted to look to
the contexts, influences, and consequences of the relationship between