Page 55 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

44 From medium to meaning

broadcasting, it had been common to think of the media as a kind of
national “hearth” around which the whole nation gathered, by the millen-
nium it was no longer common to think of the media in those terms. Cable
television brought dozens, then hundreds, of channels into the home. The
Internet, the World Wide Web, and other advancements in digital commu-
nication provided still more sources of media experience and more
competition for the previously dominant media. Other technologies,
including video games, hand-held devices, and cellular phones, as well as
new software services such as instant messaging and pod-casting, made the
media sphere increasingly complex and multifaceted. An important impli-
cation of this for research was that it became increasingly difficult to study
“the media” as a whole. Even the relatively straightforward task of
measuring audience sizes for marketing and advertising purposes became
more difficult.
This has served to reinforce approaches to audience research that have
at the same time made the study of religion in media more central. At mid-
century, the questions seemed simpler, but that simplicity hid a range of
important questions that could not be answered by the available means.
Religion is a complex, subtle, and nuanced phenomenon, and, as we will
see in the next chapter, is becoming more complex all the time. The
simplicity of earlier times hid the fact that it was not clear precisely what
effects media content might be having on religious meaning and religious
practice. The large trends were available, but there were many questions
that could not be answered without different methods, methods more
sensitive to the nuances of religion and spirituality.
Where the nineteenth century ended with the emergence of the entirely
new cultural and social reality of mass communication, the twentieth
ended with mass communication changing in ways that made the whole
notion of the “mass” problematic. Technological change has thus made
culturalist questions inevitable and necessary, a matter we will explore in
more detail in the next chapter.