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Conclusion: what is produced? 281

own quest for a meaningful answer. The model, notes Roof, is Lifton’s idea
of the “protean self.” The “fluidity” is in the process, whereby it is
possible to always be on the lookout for new insights and resources. At the
same time, “grounding” is important, and the resources of tradition,
history, doctrine, “shared memory” and “imagined community,” as well as
resources from unconventional places and of unconventional types, such as
those available in and through media, are important touchpoints to this
“grounding.” We should remember as well that the media are also a
source and a context through which more traditional symbols, ideas, and
values are made available.
It also appears that the model of meaning-making we developed earlier,
that of narratives of self serving the construction of “ideal selves” (pace
Giddens), describes rather well the picture we’ve seen in these interviews.
While it can’t be said that we necessarily know and know of all the other
locations and modes of interaction through which meanings are made,
there is much evidence available here of cultural and social resources being
brought to the service of self and identity.
There is less evidence here of direct religious, spiritual, or quasi-reli-
gious or quasi-spiritual functions and effects of media. True, we did not set
out to identify places where media were being transformed into religion or
were transforming religion in a fundamental way, but we did conduct our
interviews in places where evidence of this happening would be available
to us. Questions of the role of the formal characteristics of media presenta-
tion in making media experience “real” in religious or spiritual terms 14
seem beside the point to the processes of negotiation we’ve seen here. The
same could be said for notions such as the “archetypal” and other
“formal” theories we noted in Chapter 3.
The same could also be said for a range of ideas rooted in the
Durkheimian notion of “enchantment” or “effervescence.” On some
fundamental level, there is thought to be a set of religious motivations or
functions that are transcendent, mystical, magical, and beyond the scope
of rational meaning and action. It has been widely assumed that formal
15
and genre characteristics of specific media place them in a position to be
able to make those modes problematic in late modernity, either by inter-
posing media experience for “real” experience, or by confusing and
complexifying commonly understood ways of understanding and inhab-
iting these modes. The result, as I’ve said, would be a “transformation” of
the nature and practice of religion and spirituality.
This study is not precisely fitted to addressing these questions, both for
conceptual and methodological reasons. At the same time, it is hard to
detect even traces of such “effects” of the media age in the interviews here.
As described by our interviewees, media experiences of a range of kinds,
including “events” such as 9/11 (experienced through the media), do not
carry with them a level of meaning or facticity that would accrue were any