Page 48 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

From medium to meaning 37

encompasses a variety of contexts, of which religion is one. So, in a way,
we will be thinking here of religious meaning as a subset – a particular
kind – of cultural meaning. This makes our quest in this book one that will
be focused on those meanings among the ones we encounter that are, or
are thought to be, or can be argued to be, religious meanings.
It is conceivable that through an exploration of religious meaning we
may come to understand other meanings as they are related to media
culture as well. It is certainly the case that a contextual exploration of reli-
gious meaning-making in the media age must necessarily be seen in the
context of the cultural meaning practice of which it is a subset. That reli-
gious meaning is – presumably – about something, suggests it might well
be a valuable heuristic for broader processes of meaning-making.
This is not to argue that religious meaning is not, in and of itself,
important and significant. Religion, and the whole range of social and
cultural resources, commitments, and symbols that we identify with reli-
gion (whether they today carry the label or not), has always been an
important feature of the social and cultural landscape. Even in highly
“secularized” societies, religion plays an important role. The fact that
secularization has not exactly worked out the way it was predicted makes
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it more important than ever to understand religion and to study the thing
in itself. Religion is an ever more prominent feature of the political land-
scape in the industrialized West and beyond. It is an important – even
determinitive – dimension of globalization. It is a motivator of social
movements. Most specifically to our task here, religion continues to be an
important element of the modern quest for the self. As we will discuss in
more detail presently, a good deal of contemporary social practice can be
seen as oriented toward the self and self-identity. This is an age where indi-
viduals increasingly pursue meaning quests directed at autonomy through
self-perfection and self-awareness. Observers of this situation note that
religion, spirituality, transcendence, and the other dimensions we have
typically identified with “religion” continue to be important (and even
growing in importance) elements of the “quest culture.”
The kind of meanings we will be interested in is a subset of all meanings
in another way as well. We will be interested not just in meaning per se,
but in that which is meaningful to specific people in specific places and at
specific times. This gets at the commonplace sense of meaning as being
potentially about something “beyond” simple social knowledge. Typically,
such meanings will be marked by a sense of utility – they will be meanings
that are to be put to some use. This notion is deeply rooted in the tradi-
tions of cultural studies. Raymond Williams, an intellectual leader in that
discipline, contended that social life involved the articulation of the indi-
vidual into a “structure of feeling,” or a set of emotions, understandings,
and cultural meanings which identified that individual with his context. 49
This notion was intended to be distinct from more purely rational or