Page 45 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

34 From medium to meaning

In my own work on televangelism, 37 I came to understand that the
significance of these ministries went beyond any reliable evidence that they
actually reached the size and kinds of audiences they claimed. Rather, what
was important about the reception of these broadcasts was how they
helped the viewers I interviewed understand and account for themselves
and their religious worldviews in contexts where they often felt like
outsiders. In the work that was in many ways the scholarly “last word” on
televangelism, Janice Peck proposed that these programs be seen as
complex arguments about the nature and significance of their contrasting
worldviews and cultural surrounds. Again, Peck suggested that questions
of their effectiveness at doing what they claimed to do – reach great
numbers of unconvinced viewers – was beside the point. 38
These various approaches in effect “changed the subject” of research on
media and religion away from the medium and toward other things: the
audience, the larger social context of meanings and symbols, relations of
power and ideology in modernity, and in so doing exposed the limitations
of approaches that look at medium and effect. First among those limita-
tions was an implicit theory of the religious individual – that he or she is a
“blank slate” on to which meaning and significance could be written with
the right combination of medium and message. Not only does such a
notion defy our received commonsensical understandings of religion (that
is, we want to think of religion as something deeper and more significant),
but it also defies much received and current scholarship on the package of
symbols, values, structures, practices, and ideas that we call “religion.”
Much of what I described in Chapter 1 as the “culturalist” turn in
work on media and religion emerged in recognition of this complexity
and subtlety. The culturalist solution described there involves refocusing
attention on audience reception and away from the processes and prod-
ucts of production. It does not necessarily address two issues implicit in
the history we’ve been discussing in this chapter, though. These issues
are the social-structural relationships between individuals, society, and
the media – the ways that media may be integrated in social life – and
the individual – even psychological – motivations and meaning practices
that constitute media reception.
Alternatives to the “medium” orientation that dominated much of the
twentieth century provide some potential resources. A particularly
intriguing notion comes from Latin America in the thought of Jesus
Martin-Barbero and his notion of “mediation.” Martin-Barbero holds that
the persuasive alternative to “medium theories” is the idea that, rather
than being objectifiable resources and influences on the culture, the media
39
play a role of mediating between the individual and her culture. In fact, a
series of “mediations” enable individuals to locate themselves in social and
cultural space and time. We assume that such things as language, ideology,
received history, social and cultural values, mythology, and consciousness