Page 98 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Articulating culture in the media age 87

cultural order make people do and think. Because we want to bring into
descriptive definition the way that specific resources from the culture (i.e.
including in the “symbolic inventory” of media texts, symbols, and
messages), we want to be able to see how the individual and the sociocul-
tural interact, and inter-relate in the meaning-making process. The best
way of describing this is as the individual seen on the social level. The
purpose is not to generalize from these individuals to other individuals, but
to say how these individuals represent the range of cultural and social
contexts and influences that have produced them as social and cultural
beings. My colleagues and I have described the implication of this “shift”
in focus this way:

We believe it enabled us to move away from a position in which we
sought to explore how individuals are relatively close or distant from
an imagined “core” of society. We could approach each person as a
“universal singular,” to use Jean-Paul Sartre’s term. Each person’s
story becomes important, for it is simultaneously the story of a unique
individual and the embodiment of the social world that has produced
her or him. 7

Thus, when we talk with people we open the possibility of learning much
about the various cultural and social elements that go into making their
view of the world and their sense of self. This grounding in the self, as I
noted in an earlier chapter, is the fundamental project of late modernity,
and a reflexive engagement in that project typifies late-modern social
consciousness. Thus when we engage people in conversations about these
things, we can imagine that what they are telling us is a reflexive account
related in some way to what they actually think about who they are and
where they fit in the cultures they inhabit.
My colleagues and I have become convinced that the way the media
enter into such accounts is itself structured in important ways, ways that are
rooted in the reflexivity of the late-modern moment. We describe this in
terms of three “levels of engagement” with the media that we have
observed in our conversations with our informants.
The first of these levels is experiences in the media. These are our infor-
mants’ first-order relations to media texts. They recount the pleasures, the
irritations, the satisfactions, the boredom, the revulsions, etc., that we all
express related to the media we encounter. These are familiar to us in rela-
tion to our own viewing of media. They are also the core of what used to
be called “uses and gratifications” media research, the reasons and satis-
factions that people express for the various media they consume. They
speak to the more direct salience of various kinds of media for various
needs and interests. Much of this talk relates to specific genres of media. It
is on this level that viewers and audiences can and do express their most