Page 51 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

40 From medium to meaning

notes, such practices were anticipated decades ago by Eric Hobsbawm’s
notion of “invented tradition.”
An important nuance in Roof’s (and other) work is the notion that the
resources that the individual brings to bear on his spirituality or religiosity
are largely encountered as objects. By this I do not mean to say that they
are “things” in the sense of material culture, though such things are indeed
part of what we encounter in culture that relates to religion and spiritu-
ality. Instead, I want to argue that we think of cultural symbols and
resources as objects in relation to each other and to the range of things we
encounter in our subjective experience of daily life. Again, this is a bit of a
heuristic, a way of separating out this kind of practice from the ways we
have typically thought of media. Thus, I tend to think of media as
“objects,” not as “texts” or “messages,” or “environments,” or “ideological
systems” at least as they are encountered by selves in the lived environ-
ment. In the following chapters, we will explore how this works in the
context of individual meaning-making.
Symbolic-interactionist theory provides a way of thinking about indi-
viduals and their relationship to culture and cultural objects, particularly
around questions of identity and meaning, which may be of some use here.
On the most basic level, interactionism holds that we develop as social
beings through our interactions with others, and that those interactions
62
involve a kind of conscious self-construction and self-representation. We
learn who we are, how we act, what is valued, and what is appropriate
through interactions with others. Over time, we develop an idealized sense
of self that is relevant to our specific place, time, and web of social rela-
tions. This supports a logic of social and cultural life as the construction of
identities that we understand to make sense because they reflect our under-
standings of the cultural logics of the contexts we live in and because they
contain the cultural objects, including symbols, values, and languages, that
help constitute and make sense in those contexts. 63 The approach I am
arguing for here assumes a role for media practices and media objects in
such constructions of self and identity. How limited, extensive, determina-
tive, or passive the role of such objects is, is in a way an empirical question
that will be tested in later chapters. For now, though, it is important to see
that, for some good reasons, we can expect there to be a role for media in
meaning and identity.
This becomes a more subtle and nuanced contrast with traditional
“effects”-oriented media theory in a number of ways. Along with the
various valences of culturalist media studies in general, it wants to look at
the media from the perspective of media audiences and individual and
collective meaning-making, rather than from the perspective media institu-
tions or texts. It wants to understand things in terms of the media objects
as symbolic resources rather than as determinative ideological construc-
tions. It wants to propose that the important questions may be in the