Page 95 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Chapter 4

Articulating life and culture in

the media age

Plausible narratives of the self

This should be a simple task. We are interested in charting the way that
religious lives and religious identities are formed in relation to media
culture. We began with what seemed a rather straightforward question, that
of how the emergence of the media as a fundamental condition of modern
and late-modern life has affected religion. And, as we have seen, much of
the received thought and scholarship about the relationship of media and
religion presents itself as straightforward as well. At the same time, though,
the rather simple question of what “effect” the media may have had on
“religion” raises a plethora of complex and fascinating issues. We have set
the stage, though, for a more focused approach: we will “go and ask.” Or,
more precisely, we will engage in conversations with real people about the
way they use media, about the way they think about religion and spiritu-
ality, and about the relationships between these things in their lives.
In this chapter, I will lay out a strategy for researching the relationship
between religion and media at this most basic and provocative level: where
individuals and groups in the various media audiences encounter media
texts and engage in media practices. Following Wade Clark Roof’s sugges-
tion in the last chapter, we will want to look at the symbolic resources or
the “symbolic inventory” available in the media sphere, the practices of
consumption, interaction, and articulation through which those resources
are accessed, and the experiences of the individuals who are active in this
process of reception.
Earlier, we explored some of the history and complexity of researching
media audiences and their reception of media. We looked first at how
media and mass communication scholarship developed along with the
emergence of the media sphere as a technological and social phenomenon.
What we saw there was a gradual evolution away from the initial idea that
the media should be looked at as large, monolithic social forces and
toward the notion that they are better understood in terms of their use and
reception in lived lives. We also considered the argument that questions of
religion, spirituality, transcendence, etc., are particularly apt topics for a
reception-oriented, qualitative, ethnographic approach.