Page 43 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

32 From medium to meaning

questions in more nuanced ways. A major turning point was the “People’s
Choice” studies of the 1950s conducted by Paul Lazersfeld and Elihu
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Katz. These studies of voting behavior found, rather than a leading role
in affecting political attitudes, a rather limited effect for the media. The
key conceptual shift was away from an assumption that the media would
play some sort of autonomous, determinitive role, to a view that the media
should be seen as one element of a larger set of social dynamics that
explained voting behavior. In one key turn, Katz proposed that determina-
tion in voting preferences should be seen in other people, called “opinion
leaders,” with media being used by those opinion leaders as an informa-
tion source. This led to the notion that media “effects,” to the extent they
could be demonstrated in this area at least, would follow a “multi-step”
pattern, flowing through social networks rather than directly from
medium to individual. A variety of theoretical perspectives followed in
succeeding decades, including work that focused on the uses to which
people put media, and the satisfactions or gratifications they achieved as a
result. The shift in perspective is, again, important. Many of these new
evolutions of theory began to think differently about the social position of
medium, message, and reception. It became more common to think in
terms of what audiences, individuals, or communities did with the media
they consumed than what the media did to those audiences, individuals,
and communities.
These perspectives still relied on a kind of objectification of medium
and of audience or receiver. These two participants were conceived of as
independent of one another, with certain resources or potential for influ-
ence implicit in the concept of the medium, and certain needs, wants, or
functions relevant to those resources or influences implicit in the actions of
receivers. And, again, the “medium” was thought to be determinative, at
least to the extent that the given media seem to have given “purposes.”

Research on media and religion

Much research and scholarship on religion and media tended to follow
predictable patterns within the “medium” paradigms. It was possible to
conceive of various media in terms of their capacities to convey religious
messages to audiences. A certain amount of effects-oriented research has gone
on, looking at such things as the effect of religious television viewing on
church attendance and giving, and more marketing-oriented work on various
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religious messages and religious content in specifically “religious” media. But
such research was unsatisfying when applied to questions of religion because
of something implicit – a theory of the psychology or sociology of religion –
that religion could be in effect “caused” by something like “media.” 31
That the relationship between medium and audience could be seen
differently, however, was available in some accounts of religion and media