Page 47 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

36 From medium to meaning

Theories of “mediation” and of artifacts and commodities help get us part
way there, helping us understand that, as people interact with media arti-
facts, they will be involved in a process that at the same time connects
them with their various cultures and with remembered and imagined pasts
and sources of insight and meaning. But a gap in our knowledge will
remain. We still want to know how that mediation is felt, understood, and
used in the various contexts of daily life. More specifically, we want to
know what social meanings the media have in those contexts.
A focus on meaning is both a contrast with other approaches, and a
potential complement to them. It enables us to see how the various media
and messages that are accessible to individuals in the private sphere are
received, understood, and potentially used in other spheres of social and
cultural life. More importantly, though, a focus on meaning gets to the
heart of the relationship of media to culture. The burden of culturalist
theory, after all, is to understand how cultural meanings are produced and
reproduced through the instruments and contexts of the culture. What
meanings are made through mediated sources are an important component
of that larger process, of course. More fundamentally, though, looking at
the process of meaning-making should allow interpretive purchase on the
specific role that media culture, in particular, plays.
For the specific questions of concern to us here, those surrounding
media and religion, a focus on meaning-making has additional benefits.
We assume that a good deal of what we will encounter in addressing ques-
tions of religion, spirituality, faith, transcendence, and “deeper meaning”
will be subtle, diffuse, and nuanced. Religion and spirituality are assumed
to be highly subjective, complex, and subjunctive components of life. What
we know about contemporary religion from religion scholarship further
holds that many of the concrete formal, inductive, and structural dimen-
sions that have traditionally defined religion, religious difference, and
religious meaning are changing and evolving in late modernity. Thus, the
measurement of that which is intrinsically religious, spiritual, transcen-
dent, or deeply meaningful has become more difficult as time has gone on.
The indicia that once worked do so no longer. Indeed, as I will discuss in
more detail later in the book, much of the definition of these things is now
itself lodged in subjective processes of self- and cultural exploration. This
means that analysis and interpretation of contemporary religion depends
more and more on accounting for both the practices individuals engage in,
and their own definition of the object of their engagement in cultural
meaning.
Given the nature of our exploration here – that we are looking at issues
related to religion – it is important to note that not all “meaning” is the
same. And, not all meaning is religious meaning. As should be clear from
this discussion, it is axiomatic of culturalist scholarship that meanings are
connected with cultures, and that meaning is, in fact, a broad category that