Media
Trends and Contemporary Ministries:
Changing Our Assumptions
About Media
Adán
M. Medrano
JM Communications
Houston,
Texas
USA
May 6, 1998
However, in order to do this, every ministry in our church and every academic discipline in our universities will have to collaborate in an inter-disciplinary fashion. In other words, in order to take advantage of current trends, we will have to overcome the traditional separation between media and other church ministries.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the discipline of media, as it has operated alone, is not able to satisfactorily address and encompass the spiritual dimensions and the complexity of traditional ministries like liturgy, spiritual retreats and catechesis. On the other hand, these traditional ministries, separate from the discipline of media, are becoming isolated from the spaces of imagination and symbolic practice where people live and, to that extent, find themselves searching for language and relevance.
I believe that it will be the rich sacramental, ritualistic, and symbolic tradition of the church which will provide guidance.
I would like to present four considerations. First of all I would like to provide a very general view of some significant trends in media technology for the purpose of placing the work of the church into perspective and in context. Within that context, I would then look at the operating assumptions which underpin current church media apostolates. Thirdly, I would like to outline how new understandings of media which are coming from media and cultural studies enable us to change our assumptions about media. And lastly, I would like for us to discuss the implications of these new understandings to our media apostolates, and also to all our other apostolates.
I see five major trends in media technology today.
These trends can be seen in every sector of the media industry: cable, direct broadcast satellite, digital audio radio, the Internet, High Definition TV and the telephone.
This is the context within which the church lives and works. It is worth our consideration this afternoon not because I offer you ideas about how to enter the market to obtain a greater market share for Christ. Nor do I offer you ideas about investment in properties, or in licensing of broadcast spectrum, although all of these are to be considered within our communications work, particularly their economic aspects and the challenges they pose to us in re-looking at our social justice tradition.
There is a previous, more fundamental question. I propose that this afternoon we look at media technology and ask what is the appropriate task or tasks of the church? In other words, what are the issues that the church can address that no other institution can? I believe that each of the many ministries in the church will answer this question in a unique way, and that media should be approached from those vantage points. In other words, our approach will be pluralistic and will arise from the practice of ministry.
Before suggesting what it is that we could do, I would like to consider what it is that we have been doing. I propose that we look at five assumptions which, in my opinion, are currently the operating assumptions in the church’s communications apostolates.
The Church’s Operative Assumptions About Media
By looking at each of these five operating assumptions, I’d like to explore how they might change if and when we take a closer and more critical view of media practice. Not as we would like it to be, but as it really is, with not only its dark side, but also the bright side. The work of Drs. Stewart Hoover, Lynn Schofield Clark, Mary Hess, David Morgan, Roberto Goizueta and other innovative scholars have formed the basis of much of this analysis. Pioneering media projects in Latin America like Centro Javier in Mexico City, Diakonía in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and ECOM in Quito, Ecuador have also helped to form the following ideas.
The first assumption is that media and church are distinct, bounded, separate realities. I will propose that these two worlds have conflated into each other and share the same spaces. By this I mean that we are encountering religious experience in everyday media culture, and it is in media culture that our religious symbols and myths are alive. It is in the media culture that we create our identities of who we are, who God is, and how we should live. I will take the example of the movie theatre, which some have called the cathedral of today, where audiences gather together to encounter God in parables of good and evil, the here and the hereafter.
The second working assumption which I listed is that media are instruments of transmission and they are necessary to the church so that we can deliver a message. Much like trucks or trains are used to deliver products or merchandise, we are accustomed to say that we must deliver the message of the gospel. This is a transportation model which conceives of media as instruments which move products from point A to point B.
It seems to me that we need a new metaphor, a more appropriate model of media, one which conceives of media as an environment, a context, a culture. Media technology has become naturalized in our daily environment and is in fact the material with which we form and inform our habits, relationships, conversation and identities. In terms of our church life, shared media experiences provide the symbolic material for our imagination and the construction of our religious identity.
If at a social gathering, a party, we ask someone to say something about himself or herself, to identify themselves as it were, they will most probably use media experiences to do so. They will say what music they like, what movies they have seen. Their heroes or heroines will most likely be media figures. More and more, this is the case, not the exception.
Moreover, ritualistic and community behavior, is increasingly media behavior. Consider the many occasions when youth watch a special television show as a group, bonding of the group happens through a media viewing experience. Or consider the daily ritual of a religious community when it gathers before vespers to watch the evening news. It is in this sense that media are a cultural context. The "message" being transmitted is only one aspect of this ritualistic, communal experience.
Community building in our media context is both local and global because the nature of media is both local and global. An example of this is when we take pride at being Catholic as we see televised images of Pope John Paul II meeting Fidel Castro on the Cuban soil and praying with millions of Cubans. Or when we felt sorrow over the death of Diana. These media experiences are highly textured, deeply rooted cultural experiences which touch at who we are religiously. This is much more than "message delivery."
As a final example, I would like to quote from a posting which I read last week on an Internet discussion group called Christ in Media Culture, directed by Dr. Peter Horsfield in Australia. As the convenor of this listserve, Dr. Peter Horsfield reported the following anecdote:
"As we sometimes do, the whole of my office floor got together this morning for a coffee break - someone brings something to eat, the word goes out, and people leave their desks and gather for twenty minutes. Just like lots of factories, offices and schools around the world. Small community formation gatherings.
Conversations on occasions like this frequently meander around lots of topics: the weekend, kids' activities, work issues, that sort of thing.
This morning? No meandering, no hunting for topics. Straight into it- an explosion of passion - the sudden death of Assumpta Fitzgerald, the pub owner on the Irish TV program, Ballykissangel, which was on last night. For those who don't know Bally K, Assumpta and the Catholic curate had developed strong romantic tension in previous episodes, and last night that was finally made explicit – Father Peter was going to leave the priesthood, his parish priest was angry, they were beginning to make plans, when suddenly Assumpta was electrocuted by a faulty fuse box in the pub.
What interested me was the passion this generated in our coffee group of around a dozen - was this a television program we were talking about, or real life? Someone who missed the program last night asked what happened, and flopped into a seat when told. "I can't believe she's dead," the person said on a number of occasions, "and I forgot to tape it." Half the group at times was all talking at the same time. Someone was angry that they solved the religious problem of a priest being in love by killing off the woman. (Personally, if the next program keeps him in the priesthood and the system's protected by killing off a strong woman, then I'm going to be angry!) Someone said that after the program finished last night they felt they needed to talk to someone but there was no one around to talk to.
Someone half-jokingly suggested I should email the whole building and offer a grief counseling session in the chapel. One of our group who was a priest for 27 years before leaving and subsequently marrying, shared some of the experience and process in a way we'd never heard before."
There is more here than simply message delivery.
The third operating assumption of Catholic Church media apostolates is that the voice of the church commands attention because of its traditionally strong moral authority both in the family and in society. I will leave it to the seasoned public relations professionals here to provide examples that this is no longer the case. We seem to know this fact, given our many experiences. And yet so often when we design television programs, or when we make plans to purchase TV and radio stations and newspapers, we do so, convinced that if we identify ourselves as church it is in itself an advantage.
Television marketing studies have revealed, time and again, that people in general do not want to watch religious TV programming. But they do want to watch moral, or ethical, or values programming. Where media are concerned, people are seeking the gospel, but do not care for the institutional wrapping. This is why the audience for "electronic church" programs like Eternal Word Network of the American nun, Mother Angelica, and many others, have such a miniscule audience. The fact that audiences for religious programs are so small is the reason, that those types of programs have never been able to compete with so called "secular" programs on television, and consequently they must always beg for donations in order to stay alive.
This fact was known all through the 1980’s when studies were being conducted about religious television programming. One telling example is a study conducted ten years ago, by a group of Catholic producers who wanted to produce programming for national cable television. They hired ASI Market Research Inc. in Los Angeles, a highly regarded market research firm, to find out what types of religious programs would have the highest interest among cable viewers. The results of this US$25,000 study were most interesting. First of all, most people interviewed, considered themselves to be religious (about 80%). "However, most television viewers do not watch religious programming. In fact, many television viewers appear to avoid religious programming." Religious programming carries a negative connotation, except for one third of the population which watched only about 2 hours per week or less.
The positive findings indicated that viewers were interested in programs which promoted "traditional values." Traditional values was defined by the viewers as those programs which teach right from wrong, and the examples given were programs which illustrate morality through a storyline.
The market research firm said to the Catholic producers,
This was hard to swallow. The Catholic producers did not follow the recommendations of the study and continued to produce identifiably religious programs. Most of the ministries which participated in that study have closed or dramatically "downsized."
It seems to me that part of the problem is that we have not found a way to do two things which are both necessary. On the one hand, we must exist in the public arena of media as church. This is necessary in order to strengthen our identity and to witness. But on the other hand, we are unable to find a compelling voice among the many others offering "traditional programming" which to the viewer very much satisfies a religious need, satisfies it much more than specifically religious programming. I believe that this quandry is one of the most important issues facing the church today.
More and more the church must recognize that it is one voice among many. It seems to me that as we search deeply and thoroughly to find our appropriate voice, as church we are operating from a strength. That strength is a prophetic voice, a witness of community, and a storehouse of symbolic, narrative and sacramental resources.
Fourthly, we assume that the practice of media use and consumption is predictable. I submit that if one looks at ethnographic and anthropological research being conducted in the US, Chile, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and other countries, one finds that media messages are polysemic. Each of us plays with entertaining media and constructs our own personal meaning. Sometimes we agree with the producer, sometimes we strongly disagree and we protest and contest with the producer, and other times we negotiate and find ways of enjoying part of it and completely ignoring other parts. The context within which media consuming happens, also determines the meaning. If the context changes, that is the place and the time, we will construct a different meaning for the same media product.
If media effects were predictable, there would not be the constant hemorrhaging of advertising dollars trying to stay abreast of what the fickle consumer is doing. We should keep in mind that millions of dollars are lost in advertising that does not work. Millions more are lost on television programs and movies which fail miserably. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. And the determining factor is the community of consumers. That community, WE, are completely unpredictable. And if during your media planning, a media expert tells you differently, as we say in the US, "they are trying to sell you something."
And lastly, we assume that the producer determines the meaning of media messages. This is too strong and must be tempered by taking a closer look at what is happening during the viewing experience. I am a producer, and I know that I certainly determine what my program will look like and I hope that it will evoke certain reactions. But I also know that most of what the viewer experiences upon watching my programs will be determined by him or her. The locus of meaning is the viewing experience. My videos do not have a meaning until the viewer constructs that meaning. Further, each viewer will construct the meaning differently.
An Australian study of Aborigines found that they cheered during a Rambo movie as he was freeing the prisoners of war. The viewers reported that they identified with Rambo freeing the prisoners because it was a personal matter: so many of their relatives, Aborigines, were in prison, and unjustly so. By contrast, Ronald Reagan reportedly stated that Rambo was an excellent American movie, and one of his favorites, because it showed the courage of Americans. You may have similar examples of this type of differing meanings being constructed about the same movie.
It is helpful to keep in mind that meaning is constructed by the user of media according to his or her age, gender, race, class and personal history.
The importance of the producer is further diminished when we consider "media talk" as the extension and prolongation of the meaning of a media product. The meaning of the TV program or movie, or radio show does not stop when the show ends. The meaning continues in the discourse of the community and its various groups. Fan clubs and gossip about a soap opera continues the meaning and adds countless nuances. Teenagers often use topics from their favorite TV show to open discussions with their peers and work out their feelings and values about sex, authority and relationships. Of course, the discussion will include what their parents say and do.
One final example of how meaning is in the hands of the viewer. An interesting study was just completed by an independent Chilean research center, CENECA, which regularly undertakes specific research projects for the Catholic Church. The title of the research is "Youth, Spirituality and Television." The purpose of the study was to obtain some preliminary data concerning this topic because up to now we have had the opinion that television is harmful to youth, that violence and sex is harming their morals, etc.
This study found that youth do indeed find spirituality in television, but in some unexpected places. They find spirituality in sports, particularly football soccer where they report that they feel a sense of community and an emotional relationship a "one-ness" with others in their own country. They also find spirituality in call-in television programs which give advise about personal problems to callers. This touches them deeply and addresses: "how should I live."
Interestingly, they report that specifically religious programming is not spiritual because it does not enable participation nor does it enable a sense of community belonging. They find it predictable and not caring.
Dr. Lynn Schofield Clark notes similar findings in her work with youth in the Boulder Colorado area. Her research findings are soon to be published here in the US.
Would these findings not be surprising to the producer of specifically religious programming?
I have attempted here to suggest reasons for taking a closer look at our current assumptions about media and reflecting upon them. The new media culture has implications not only for the ministry of communications, but for all of the church’s ministries. In order to engage today’s media culture all of the church’s ministries will have to put their hand to the plow, collaboratively. New wine calls for new wineskins. There could not be a better time to address these opportunities for renewal, as we face the third millenium.
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