Page 49 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

38 From medium to meaning

pragmatic motivations and actions in social life. Meaningful knowledge or
experience would among other things be that which effectively serves the
connection of individuals to their structures of feeling. Foucault’s idea of
“episteme” and Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” address similar ideas and
functions in the social and cultural world.
An important project for individuals in modernity is the construction of
the self. Influential theorists of late modernity hold that the conditions of
contemporary social life enforce on individuals a set of responsibilities they
did not have in the past. Whereas once social and cultural structures and
other arrangements could be depended on to provide plausible and
compelling ideals, values, and resources for social life, today those same
arrangements have broken down, for a number of reasons, some of which
are rooted in the emergence of the media age. This leaves individuals
increasingly on their own devices to construct meaningful and functional
ways of understanding themselves as social beings. Anthony Giddens,
perhaps the most prominent of these theorists, suggests that, as a result, a
focus on the self and on the perfection of the self has replaced earlier path-
ways to the achievement of social knowledge. What will be meaningful in
50
media practice then should bear some relationship to this emerging
concept and project of self.
There is, at the same time, some controversy over the role of media in
the project of the self. One of the causes of this new situation, to Giddens,
is very much a phenomenon of the media age; Giddens contends that the
existence of modern mass communication and its broad circulation of
knowledge about the nature of daily life has directly supported the develop-
ment of a new kind of social and cultural consciousness, which he calls
51
“reflexivity.” Individuals today are more “reflexive” in the sense that they
know and understand the web of social and cultural relations – and their
place in that web – in a more sophisticated way than would have been
typical earlier. This knowledge has both positive and negative consequences
of course, but is simply a fact of late modern life. Psychologist Kenneth
52
Gergen, in contrast, sees a very different – and more negative – role for
media culture in the contemporary project of the self. To Gergen, the self is
under assault from the range and sophistication of cultural symbols,
appeals, and contexts to which we have access today. He calls this the
“saturated self,” unable to find a standpoint or position of reference that
might have been available to the formation of a stable self in times past. 53
Giddens and Gergen thus present quite different views of the individual’s
relationship to media culture. For Giddens, while there are challenges to
social life and social consciousness in the media age, the practices of the self
are about individuals relating to culture with a certain autonomy. Gergen
also sees this cultural practice in the hands of individuals, but at the same
time is convinced that the sheer weight and volume of cultural contexts and
material places the individual and her project of the self at a disadvantage. 54