Page 53 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

42 From medium to meaning

practices, the point is really to look at the cultures within which they find
themselves, and to understand how the various resources of those cultures,
particularly those in the media sphere and related to religion and spiritu-
ality, are made sense of.
This is, once again, in contrast with the received paradigms in mass-
communication research, and in contrast with much of our “lay theory”
about media as well. We all know – on some level – the history of the
development and integration of media technologies into social space. We
are aware of, and even participate in, discourses about the nature and
effects of these developments. For many reasons, it makes sense for us to
think in terms of how these media – which are, after all, technologies – are
or are not to be integrated in authentic ways into our lives. There has been
a good deal of scholarship devoted to these issues, most of which illus-
trates that the integration of media into the context of daily life has been a
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process of negotiation rather than a tacit, easy, transparent thing. It thus
makes some sense that we would continue to think of the media as some-
what artificial “influences” on life, and focus on those influences in terms
of their potential pathological effects, rather than think of them as the
taken-for-granted aspects of our lives that they have become. This has had
particular purchase with regard to religion because it is a commonplace to
identify religion with values, with the inculcation of values and normative
behaviors, and with the raising of children. A religious lens or framework
directed at the media in daily life has thus been even more likely to think
in terms of pathologies or effects.
None of this is to argue that there are not media effects, even on or
related to religion. It is to argue instead that to understand the nature of
those effects, we must look more carefully at how and where and in what
contexts they are produced. And, as will be described in the next chapter,
there is good reason to believe that many of the questions we have had
regarding the religious implications of the media are simply misplaced –
that media and religion have come to function together in the context of
contemporary culture in subtle and some not-so-subtle ways.
Looking at culture and meaning-making in the context of daily life also
addresses an issue that emerges when we again pick up the narrative of the
development of the media in the US in the twentieth century. The effects
paradigm in a way made more sense in an earlier media era, one typified
by a relatively small number of dominant media. By the 1930s, the elec-
tronic media landscape in the US had settled into a situation that for many
came to be thought of as “natural”: a public media sphere that seemed to
play a large and unifying role in defining the terms of the culture. For
much of the century, the dominant media of radio and then television were
provided by three large private companies, and there was arguably little
difference between them. In that context, it made some sense to think in
terms of small variations on that theme. Effects of media were seen in