Page 39 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

28 From medium to meaning

The final significant communication-technological development of the
eighteenth century was the high-speed printing press. Beginning in London
in the 1860s, new ideas of mass production, rooted in the textile industries,
were merged with publishing, and with the introduction of steam and then
electric power, the volume of printing that could be accomplished increased
exponentially. Papers such as the Illustrated London News demonstrated the
effect that such a technological change could have on publishing by intro-
ducing new forms of content and distribution. Suddenly, a medium could
become a “mass” medium, available to a much larger readership than ever
before. The so-called “mass press” era that ensued introduced three
elements that define modern mass communication. First, high-volume, low
unit-cost production allowed individual newspapers, pamphlets, or books to
be sold much more cheaply than previously. This led to a sea change in the
nature of the reading audience. Whereas newspapers had been consumed
primarily by the middle and elite classes, they were now available to the
masses, ushering in what some have called a more “democratic” era in news
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distribution. Second, this had far-reaching consequences in the nature of
news content, as everything from the kinds of stories covered to the reading
level of the reader changed. And third, the “massification” of the media also
changed forever the way media are capitalized and financed. Previously,
newspapers had to rely on their “cover price” for income. With the evolu-
tion of the mass press, advertising could be a significant source of revenue,
and, indeed, is today the dominant source in the media. 9
Each of these features of the mass media era that more or less dawned
with the twentieth century – the massification of the audience, the “popu-
larization” of content, and the prominence of advertising as a source of
income – has become a dimension of significance, and significant debate,
in the century since. Each is, more specifically, significant to our discussion
here of relations between religion and media. With the development of the
broadcast, visual, and digital media of the twentieth century, the idea of a
“mass audience” is still relevant in some ways, but these media have
become an integral part of, and contributor to, the larger cultural environ-
ment in a very concrete and organic way. 10 Thus, their capacity to
challenge, reconstruct, or replace those institutions and practices once
typical of “religion” is rooted in this fact. The taste cultures that have
emerged in the various media are a point of continuing controversy as
well. The so-called “popular media” of television, film, and popular music
are implicated in important debates about cultural norms and social rela-
tions, having come to represent – for some – the very definition of the kind
of culture and cultural values that must be confronted and contested in
any project that is interested in normative values, as religion is. 11
The role of advertising in media is significant, too. First and foremost,
advertising gave the new media that emerged in the twentieth century a kind
of autonomy not enjoyed by the published media before that time. The