The Mediatization of Religion

When Faith Rocks

Luis Mauro Sa Martino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409436287
• eBook ISBN: 9781317024279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Politics

Filling a significant gap in the literature by offering a theoretical framework by which we can understand the issues of media, religion and politics Luis Mauro Sa Martino asks how can a religious denomination have any sort of influence on people in a secular age? The author presents data which suggests that the presence and influence of religion in public affairs around the world has been strongly supported by the use of media communication, and highlights the way some religions have adopted media communication and drawn on popular culture to build their message. The use of media enables a religion to reach more people, attract more members and generate more income but also increases religious influence on public matters. The book offers a number of case studies and contemporary examples to illustrate the theory, and will be essential reading for all students and scholars of media, politics and all those interested in the part religion plays in our society.

PART I Dimensions of Mediated Religion and the Public Space

Chapter 1 Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue

A couple of years ago the British singer, songwriter and living legend Paul McCartney came to Sao Paulo for a show. I went to watch him with a group of friends in one of the biggest football stadiums in the city. It was to begin at 9: p.m., and we arrived quite early to avoid long queuing. Late in the afternoon, inside the crowded stadium, one of my friends, a committed Jew, suddenly said to us, “If you excuse me, I would go say the evening prayers. I’ll be back in a moment.” Immediately he got his iPhone, connected to the Internet, downloaded the set of prayers for that specific day and, with earphones, he prayed. The mediated living experience of faith—this is what mediatization of religion is about.

In this chapter, I would like to explore some dimensions of the concept, trying to show how it is possible to think about the relationship between media and religion in terms of “mediated” and “mediatized” religion. The title is partially drawn on Canclini (1999).

A researcher willingly to explore the concept of mediatization will find the name itself as the first difficult to deal with. It is a relatively new word, and it is not universally employed by academics to define the same phenomenon. More to the point, the relation between “mediatization” and “mediation” is not as clear as could be expected from a concept. This ambiguity requires some preliminary remarks about the word itself prior to any further development.

As many other theoretical concepts in media and communication studies, there seems to be little consensus on the meaning of “mediatization.” It is not my goal to write a full genealogy of the concept of mediatization, and there have been many well-grounded attempts to do it (see Hjarvard 2008a; Lundby 2009; Livingstone 2009a; see also Sodré 2004, Fausto Neto, Gomes, Braga and Ferreira 2008). I would only like to stress some of its characteristics, as it may be helpful to understand contemporary relationship between media and religion—actually, in the case of religion, its mediatization cannot be understood without a further reference to the mediatization of society. The word itself may sound a little bit odd—in fact, most text processors would not recognize it. Moreover, only from 2000 onward has the concept become widely discussed in academia, and it was only towards the end of the decade that researchers started to relate mediatization to religion (Hjarvard 2008a; Gomes 2008, Gasparetto 2011; Martino 2012).

The roots of mediatization may be found in several thinkers. In what follows, I will briefly discuss some of them, drawing mainly on Livingstone (2009a) and Hjarvard (2008a). Next I will discuss some aspects of mediatization of society and religion, and, finally, the differences between “mediation” and “mediatization.”

For the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1992: 205), media communication has little to do with the “mediatization” process. He refers to “mediatization” in his Theory of Communicative Action, in the context of the “colonization” of the life-world by the system. The progressive rationalization of the life-world, colonized by the imperatives of a rational, bureaucratic and capitalist environment, detaches it from (but also makes it dependent on) the administrative system. Human activities have increasingly become “mediatized” by system imperatives, which lead to their “colonization.” “Mediatization” is related to the bureaucratic control of social action and interactions. The media play only a negative role in this process by contributing to undermine and erode the public sphere (Habermas 1992: 325).

British sociologist John B. Thompson (1995, 2005) claims that the development of media communication, from the printing press onwards, helped to shape the face of modern Western society by altering the way people, institutions and governments communicate. It has altered the social information flow, and the very way people understand their lives and culture, and has forced other institutions, as governments and churches, to face the public exposure and debate of ideas and concepts, which is an important issue in the modernization process. Further development of media industries has sharpened this process, and it has become a crucial factor of modernization in Western society.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1998, 1996: 85) has attempted a radical approach to mediatization. He states that the omnipresence of images, particularly those produced and spread by electronic media, destroys reality itself into a hyper-reality, the realm of the “simulacra,” that is, a place where the boundaries between real and non-real are not blurred, they simply do not matter anymore. The culture of image is also a culture of simulacra, where pervasive make-believe is the rule. In Plato’s Phaedrus (261e–262b), Socrates argues that it is easier to deceive people with elements that look similar to each other than with those which are dissimilar. For Baudrillard, the logic of simulacra is alike: it looks real, but it makes reality appears “more real” than it is.

These approaches, however insightful they may be, are not entirely related to the contemporary use of “mediatization.” One of the main difficulties is that the word has been employed to define a wide range of sometimes contradictory, phenomena, subjects and issues. The word itself has been subject to debate.

Sonia Livingstone (2009a: 2) points out the “semantic confusion” that envelops the whole discussion: “mediatization” is sometimes replaced, or contrasted, with “mediation,” “medialization,” “mediazation” and “remediation.” In many languages, she explains, the concept of “mediation,” particularly, has been related to the idea of “negotiation,” “getting in between.” Actually, “media,” from the Latin, refers to something that “stands in the middle” of two or more elements.

A critical approach to mediatization is also the point of Finnemann (2011). He argues that there has been many attempts to conceptualize it without a single definition. However, he also identifies a common feature, since “they are all related to a specific set of media, characterizing a specific historical epoch” (Finnemann 2011:74).

She argues, with Hjarvard (2008a), that “mediation” is a broader concept than “mediatization,” which allows research to include the idea of symbolic interactions shaped by media communication. She offers an example of it: an 8-year-old boy, after playing an online multimedia and multiplayer game with other online people, started to play the same game with his brother and sisters: each one chose a character and they re-enacted, in “real life,” what had been played online. The children defined it as “playing the Internet” (Livingstone 2009a: 8).

The Concept of Mediatization

The presence and interference of media communication in important human activities seems to be at the core of a definition of “mediatization.” Generally, mediatization refers to the set of transformations that have been taking place in contemporary society and are, in at least a very general level, to the development of media communication, particularly digital and virtual media. A preliminary definition, taken from a dictionary of media studies (Chandler and Munday 2011: 270), refers to the influence of the “logic” and the “form” of media, especially electronic media, in the communication process.

The concept stresses the ubiquitous presence of media communication, from mobile phones to the broadcasts and the Internet, as a fundamental aspect of contemporary life. The media are not only tools to convey a message, but they may also interfere in the way people communicate in everyday life. From the start, it is necessary to state that the idea of “mediatization” does not seems to be a new name for the old “mediacentered” theories as stated by McLuhan (2001) or Meyrowitz (1993, 1999).

Particularly, as Hjarvard (2008b) argues, the studies of Joshua Meyrowitz are particularly useful to better understand of the concept of “mediatization.” In his attempt to explain what are “media,” Meyrowitz (1993, 1999) develops three metaphors to explain their multi-dimensional aspects.

In the first metaphor, the media are a “channel” or a “conduit” through which a sender will pass a message to a receiver. This metaphor seems to highlight the message as free from the constraints of the medium, since this one would simply carry information from one point to another.

The media are also a “language,” that is, they have their own “grammar” to frame any particular message. This second perspective stresses the fact that media may transmit and share information accordingly to their own form and/or structure, and there is hardly any dichotomy in form/content as long as each medium frames the message in a particular way.

Finally, the media are also an “environment,” the surroundings of any contemporary human activity. This notion of environment reminds us that being “mediated” means that media are all around us. At the very moment when I write this words, I am not only looking at a digital screen, but also my mobile phone is right in front of me, there is an electronic musical keyboard in the room and all around the place there are communication media.

The notion of mediatization does not exclusively refer to any power of the media themselves, as technological devices or broadcast companies, but it focuses on how people actually articulate them in their life experiences. It is not the media themselves, but how people include the media in the broader frame of their interpersonal relationships, working life, emotional relations and so one that matters. In other words, how human life, in all its social and cultural aspects, can be lived in a world filled by messages, meanings and signs exchanged by people using technological gadgets. The process of mediatization, and the practice of religion in a mediatized environment, goes well beyond the borders of institutionalized religion itself, as churches and denominations. As Hoover and Clark (2001: 87) claims, “religion as it is expressed is often quite different from religion as we see it when it is associated with formal institutions.”

Mediatization takes the media not only as a technological element, but as a social issue that goes beyond technology itself to reach the sphere of culture, economy and personal relationships (Gomes 2010: 111). It asks for new ways of community engagement, particularly the development of networks (Castells 2010: 51). It understands media and communication as a cultural process that cannot be understood without a permanent reference to the main aspects of the society where it takes place. Media technology articulates with other elements of individual and collective life; they articulate themselves with people’s perceptions, senses and world vision—media technology is integrated in the “ecology” of communication (Clark 2009).

In another media dictionary, Abercrombie and Longhurst (2007: 220) define mediatization as the way people have incorporated into their own perceptions, sensations and affects the way media communication represents reality. It is close to what Goffman (1974) defines as “frames,” that is, the cognitive and perceptual structures that individuals use to encompass reality.

The public shares the media frames. Since the 1950s, most people, at least in the West, have been raised in an environment filled with media communication, especially radio, telephone, cinema and television. It is part of the individual’s cultural and social environment; it is a component of how people frame reality, the otherness and themselves—a component among others, of course, not even the main one, but always present. As Livingstone (2009b: ix) points out, our society is “moving towards” an environment filled by “multimodal, interactive, networked forms of communication,” and this whole environment must be analyzed in order to understand it.

The mediatization, finally, may be described as the articulations between this “media logic” and other instances of everyday life. If we consider some of the arguments by Krotz (2009), Livingstone (2009b) and Hjarvard (2008a), then “mediation” is a sort of core of the mediatization, which is a “meta-process.” Mediation would be the changes in particular social institutions caused by the adoption of media communication as part of its structure. The mediatization of an institution, practice or any other human activity would be a further step, mainly a consequence—hence a meta-process—of mediation, when mostly all practices become indelibly mediated.

Table 1.1 shows some particularities of the concepts of “mediation” and “mediatization,” a distinction that have been drawn by some researchers. It is important to point out that it is far from a conclusive—even less normative—set of concepts; as Schrott (2009: 43) explains, “definitions of mediatization are manifold,” and his arguments, for example, would hardly fit on this table. Actually, this is an attempt to outline some of the features attributed by some scholars to each of the concepts, since they are particularly relevant to this study. Moreover, it seems that “mediation” and “mediatization” are two related processes, and sometimes the borders between them seem to be blurred. That said, it is possible to draw a first outline of some elements of each concept.

Table 1.1 Mediation and mediatization as analytical concepts

	Mediation	Mediatization
Level of occurrence	Micro (individuals, institutions, organizations)	Macro (society, states, social practices)
Indicates	The use of media by an individual or institution	The individual and social articulations with the media
Question	The relationship between an individual, or institution, and the media	How people and institutions articulate their everyday practices with the media
Concept of media	Channel/Language	Environment
Focus	The constraints of a particular medium on the message	The process by which social activities draws on the media
Characteristic	Individuals and institutions use of media to share a message	Individual and social practices adopt the “logic of the media”
Time frame	Short-term action	Long-term process
Sources: Couldry (2008), Hjarvard (2008a), Livingstone (2009b)Krotz (2009) and Schutz (2004).

From this point of view, it would be hard to talk “media and society” or “media and religion,” since these elements are effectively mixed in everyday life. The concept of mediatization seems to be an attempt to overcome the dualities about the media (as, for example, “media/society,” “media/religion” and “media/culture”) and to take into the account that no social process may be fully understood without a reference to the media communication, but, on the other side, the media cannot be understood outside the broader frame of society. As Livingstone (2009b: x) argues, in the past two ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Addressing the Questions
• Part I Dimensions of Mediated Religion and the Public Space
• 1 Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North—South Dialogue
• 2 What Makes Religion Suitable for Mediatization
• 3 Mediated Religion in a Mediatized Society: The Public Visibility of Religion
• Part II Mediated Religion, Religious Practices and Culture
• 4 High-Mediated, Low-Mediated, and Some Differences among Denominations
• 5 The Politics of the Body, Appearance and Aesthetics in Mediated Religion
• 6 Borrowing Styles from the Media
• Conclusions: “Social networking? Yeah, we do that. Jump in and join us!”
• Bibliography
• Index