Page 42 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

From medium to meaning 31

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identities. It is important to my argument here to see that a given medium
and its presumed effects are assumed in most of this work. The focus is
very much on the devices, their messages, and investigations of outcomes
in audiences that are consonant with the intended effects of those devices
and messages. The effects tradition is called the “dominant” tradition in
part because of its breadth and its longevity. Major scientific studies of the
effects of motion pictures on youth audiences were published in the
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1920s. Since then, it has been widely observed that each new develop-
ment in media technology has seemed to stimulate its own set of questions
and concerns, resulting in calls for research on its effects. 25 The effects
tradition has also been broadly influential due to the fact that it is so intu-
itively persuasive. It simply makes sense to think of media as having
instrumental effects. The media themselves make such claims. Advertising
is assumed to be able to “sell,” newspapers to “inform,” entertainment
television to help us “escape,” documentary films to “take us new places,”
etc. There is also the tendency to think (along with the mass-society theo-
rists) of these media as somehow foreign to authentic and normative
community and domestic life. They are always, to some extent, “from the
outside.” In Habermas’s distinction between “lifeworld” and “system
world,” the media carry telltale characteristics of the latter, even as they
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evoke symbols and values of the former. As we will see in later chapters,
the notion of the media as distinct from authentic, expressive living is
always there, just beneath the surface. It therefore made sense for much
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attention to be paid to media effects.
In both scholarly and popular discourse, the media seem also to be
somehow always “new.” This is one of the implications of their emergence
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of the process of
industrialization and the march of modernity. Because we can draw a clear
line of temporal demarcation around them that connects them (in most
industrialized countries in the West) with the large-scale social transforma-
tions of industrialization, they are placed in cultural “memory” in a certain
category, and again this makes it logical to think in terms of their effects.
Marshall McLuhan and others who engage in “grand theory” of the
media age represent a different kind of effort to account for the evolution
of media in modernity. As with the effects tradition, they see these devices
as new and embedded in a certain place in the grand sweep of modernity,
and attempt to unlock the secrets of their significance for individuals and
societies. And, consistent with the effects tradition, there is the assumption
that it is something about these media as media that is at the root of their
significance. 28
Looking at mass communication in terms of its technologies and tech-
nological arrangements alone proved to be unsatisfying rather early in the
development of mass communication and media theory. The effects tradi-
tion was soon joined by a set of “limited effects” traditions that saw the