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Conclusion: what is produced? 271

her social context, and with the media, are serving to provide a standpoint
through which she can come to understand her evolving self.
The unresolved issue here, of course, is whether we should be optimistic
or pessimistic about this situation. There is reason to believe – against the
argument that the postmodern condition lacks centers and standpoints and
organizing logics – that there is a centering in the “common cultural”
aspects of media experience. Among the lamentations about the late-modern
condition is a concern about the emerging “identity politics” that increas-
ingly define the political age. Religion has been identified as a major player in
this regard. Religion, the argument goes, serves increasingly to provide
alternative centers and sources of interests and insights, supporting an
increasing atomization of the cultural center. The evidence here would
suggest an alternative reading. Religion can and does provide such sources
of centering and meaning, and our interviewees readily referred to its lessons
and its value for them. At the same time, though, they also saw themselves
as part of a larger mediated cultural discourse. This does not, of course,
necessarily mean that there is a consensus (Glenn Donegal in Chapter 4
comes to mind), but it cannot be said that the religious conservatives among
our interviewees, for example, are isolated at the margins of the culture.
Like everyone else – as media audiences – they participate in that culture. 7

Negotiations with media and culture

In Chapter 4, I argued for the narrative approach in this study, contending
there that such narratives would provide a kind of heuristic through
which we could see the interacting relations of media, religion, spiritu-
ality, and context as cultural resources to meaning-making. I further
argued that there was value in making the question of “identity” the
central organizing idea of this inquiry, because it would provide an occa-
sion through which we could see these various elements coming together
in the self-presentation of identity. As we’ve seen along the way, it has
made sense to describe the process of meaning-making in these domains
as a “negotiation” between often disparate ideas, contexts, and claims.
And, in some ways, “disparate” is not quite the right word. In many
cases, what we encountered was evidence of contradictions in these lives
and these narratives, along with the ways that our interviewees were
working to resolve them.
These negotiations are among the most interesting and helpful things
we’ve encountered in our interviews. To a greater extent than we perhaps
expected, our interviewees, in their narratives, express a level of reflexive
autonomy in the way they construct these narratives of self. We clearly
expected a level of reflexivity in these accounts. Giddens contends that this
sense of positionality vis-à-vis culture is one of the most significant things
about late-modern life. Further, based both on Giddens and on the