Page 97 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

86 Articulating culture in the media age

media. In a large qualitative study of the British television audience, for
example, David Gauntlett and Annette Hill found that, in the most funda-
mental ways, television is integrated into the context of daily life in the
home. It is structured into the tempos and patterns of the day, regulating
some, being regulated by others. At the same time, its content is a matter
3
of both pleasure and guilt for them. In a more recent study of media in the
domestic sphere, my colleagues and I found that the media are integrated
into the way parents think about themselves as parents, forming an impor-
4
tant element of family identity. That research found parents in a way
mapping their practices of parenting and their children’s progress through
socialization by means of the media, the kind of media consumed in the
home and the means by which the media were or were not regulated. 5

Talking about media
On the most basic level our task now is to move to the context of daily,
domestic, and social life, to find out how people there negotiate media into
their spiritual and religious lives. This involves talking with them about
media, about religion and spirituality, and about values. One of the criti-
cisms I’ve leveled at traditional approaches to media research is that they
assume too much about the power and prerogatives of the media and too
little about what people do with those media texts and other resources
when they encounter them. This criticism is, as we’ve seen, consistent with
general trends in culturalist media studies. It moves toward in-depth quali-
tative interpretation and description, and away from more superficial,
large-context issues and questions. It enables us to talk about how media
are received and used within the flow of daily life in relation to the other
resources, activities, relationships, and influences available there.
In another context, my colleagues and I have described the approach we
take as “constructivist.” By this, we mean that it recognizes that the
knowledge we produce through research such as this is constructed in a
series of steps and contexts, including the design of research, the interviews
and their outcomes, the analysis of those interviews, the writing of inter-
pretations and findings, and, finally, the reception of the research by
readers. That second step, the interviews themselves, is of course key, as it
6
is our source of insights – as researchers and as readers – into the
processes, practices, and meanings we seek to understand more fully.
So, how are we to think about these interviews? What kind of knowl-
edge and process do they represent? It is important to understand how
informants represent the social and cultural contexts that they inhabit.
Because of our interest in contextualizing the meanings they make, we
want to hold the conversation at the borderline between the individual and
the social levels. These questions are not only a matter of individual moti-
vation and psychology, and nor are they a matter of what the social and