Page 279 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

268 Conclusion: what is produced?

found there, and through its news and entertainment programs – and
increasingly through its “infotainment” – television increasingly tells us
not necessarily “what to talk about,” but “what is being talked about.”
Our interviewees expressed a sense of these relations as going on “out
there,” and of being important both for what they can tell us about what
is going on, but also to keep us current on what everyone else is talking
about, too. This notion of media as a set of “cultural currencies of
exchange” is not a new idea, of course, but in the context of interviews
that probed religion and spirituality as potential alternative contexts of
meaning and value we might have expected to encounter views at some
distance from the norm. We really did not. Instead, what we found was a
negotiation between these assumed and taken-for-granted media-centered
discourses and alternative values and ideals. The question is whether the
“momentum” seems to be more with the media discourse or with the alter-
native (i.e. the religious or spiritual context). We’ll return to this matter
shortly.
The third level on which the “commonness” of media culture seems to
operate is related to the capacities of the media to present culturally rele-
vant material in powerful and attractive ways. In our discussion of
interviewees’ “experiences in” media, we noted that the motivations for a
wide range of media choices among them were explainable simply by the
tactile, sensorial, or other attractiveness of certain media. The media work
in part because they are well-crafted, salient, and fitted to their time and
place. We’ve tended to focus on the “guilty pleasures” we’ve encountered
here in terms of the sources of the “guilt,” but we need to remember that
the real story is the “pleasure.” Rachel Albert, a “born-again Christian”
we met in Chapter 6, watched X-Files and Star Trek, programs that she
clearly knew were at odds with her expressed religiosity. But, they were
attractive, compelling, and absorbing for her in the same way they were
for millions of others. These programs (and most others) work because
they articulate and express important ideas and values that are in play in
the culture. Rachel, and nearly everyone else we interviewed, was well
aware of those discourses, and found some measure of involvement in
them through her participation in television representations of them. Her
willingness to include accounts of this practice in her narrative of self may
be a measure of her quest to integrate ideas from both sources – the
broader culture and her religious faith – into a coherent whole.
Among the ideas we considered in the early chapters was the notion of
“dualism,” and the idea that we could helpfully think of “religion” (or
“faith” or “belief” or “spirituality”) and “media” as separate and sepa-
rable spheres. I speculated that we needed to move beyond such an idea
because it was likely that, in the media age, media would be increasingly
taking the role of providing religiously and spiritually meaningful
resources. While there is evidence that that line is being crossed (discussed