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56 Media and religion in transition

available in the media environment, what we might call the “symbolic
inventory” out of which individuals make religious or spiritual meaning.
Second is the practices of consumption, interaction, and articulation
through which those meanings are accessed, understood, and used. And
third is the centering of this in the experiences of the individuals who are
doing the consuming and the meaning-making.
Chapters 4 through 8 of this book are an exploration of the so-called
“symbolic marketplace” of the media as experienced in the daily lives of
individuals and families. The orientation is to take seriously the idea that
the media today play a central role in providing the symbolic resources
through which we make meaning of our social worlds, and that religion
and spirituality are important parts of that meaning-making for many of
us. Our investigations then begin with the assumption that we can and
should go to people where they are, and “look back with them” – as it
were – at the symbolic environment they inhabit, attempting to understand
how they integrate those symbolic resources into senses of who they are,
what they believe, and what they should do.

Media and the “symbolic inventory”
Before we begin those explorations, though, we should take a look at the
media landscape with an eye to understanding the nature of the symbolic
inventory it offers and its integration into large social and cultural themes
and values. The point here is not merely to catalog the self-consciously
“religious” material that might be available there, but to understand the
ways that patterns of reception, consumption, and meaning-construction
today might find material of various kinds and implications available in
the media sphere. To do this, we need to be conscious of what we have just
reviewed about the changing nature of the media landscape and the
changing nature of religion. Thus, we will imagine self-conscious, reflexive
individuals encountering a complex and diversifying media landscape, and
finding there (or at least looking for) material that relates to their ongoing
sense of themselves as religious or spiritual.
A number of sources and contexts of media present themselves as
possible locations for these practices to exist in daily life. The sort of
“received” ideas discussed in Chapter 1 would have us looking at the loca-
tions in the media landscape that we think of as the likely places in a
formal sense. That is, places where “religion” as a category might be
thought of as likely or at least expected. But, as we discussed there, there is
reason to expect that some unexpected sources might well be significant to
religious or spiritual “seeking” or “questing” (to use the terms introduced
earlier). The media landscape can be divided up in a number of ways, but
for our discussion here, for reasons that will become clearer in later
chapters, it makes sense to look at things in four rather general cate-