Religion And Mediated Popular Culture: The Need For Dialogue
By Frances Forde Plude
[This text was published in Communicatio Socialis: Challenge of Theology and Ministry in the Church, Helmuth Rolfes and Angela Ann Zukowski, eds., Kassel: Kassel University Press, 2007.]
…it is finally only the human being who is capable of information and knowledge. This goes beyond the new technical means and stays as a quality of the human person. - Franz-Josef Eilers, Communicating in Community1
I have been blessed with colleagues who respect cultural differences; and who listen. This has watered the roots of my own deep respect for dialogic communication and the empowerment supported by two-way communication. This paper reviews recent dialogic theory and develops a proposed ‘map’ of the practical terrain, reflecting upon how various communication technologies have produced a ‘talk-back’ culture. This culture has often been a challenge to the Catholic Church and her leadership.
The M.I.T. scholar Ithiel de Sola Pool is responsible for my ‘born-again’ passion for the interactive or dialogic dimension of communication. During my Harvard doctoral study, I had access to his classes at M.I.T. Pool also generously served as my dissertation advisor as I wrote on direct broadcast satellite policy development.2 In addition to my classes with Pool, two of his works were influential in my thinking. The first, The Social Uses of the Telephone (1977), studied basic concepts such as the telephone’s productive functions, the transparency of the tool when used, its importance for isolated individuals, the special role of women in its development, its function as the ‘heartbeat’ of large cities, and its life-saving role in telephone conversations and hotline groups.
Armed with these reflections I began to see dialogic communication as vital to a society in general, and to the Catholic Church specifically. I began to understand the importance of guaranteed and universal access to talk-back communication systems and tools. Early United States public policy reflected this access issue; the U.S. Congress required the telephone company monopoly to provide service for isolated rural communities along with its lucrative high-density urban phone development.
Pool’s later book, Technologies of Freedom, published in 1983 shortly before his death, helped me to understand the key role that emerging and converging new-technology interactive communication tools would play in encouraging freedom of expression and the processes of negotiation throughout the world. In this work Pool examined the significance of:
unhindered speech
limited resource availability
computers as the printing presses of the future
avoiding communication monopolies
the marketplace of ideas
the importance of a diversity of voices and tools
the role of limited regulation
As Pool noted, idea development and speech are not free if these communication forums are not open. Today, sadly, even in some advanced societies and institutions (some would say even in the Roman Catholic Church), there are serious restrictions on two-way communication; many members – minority groups, laity and women – are not able to participate in representative numbers in policies and decision-making at upper levels of the church’s administrative structure.
Analytical Framework
Reflecting upon the relationships among communication studies, media, culture, and religion, and the challenge of supporting authentic integration of these sectors, several concepts emerge.
Foremost is the principle/process of interactivity and I examine that below. I begin by reflecting upon the development of interactive communication systems up through the late modern context, I have examined this evolution in the light of co-existing cultural factors, varied media formats, and strands of social and religious thought. Later in the paper I examine dialogue as theory and communicative action, including the concept of interactivity as infrastructure – the role of networks in contemporary communication systems.
Finally, I mention several practical applications of these interactive ideas. The first ‘case study’ is the mediation issue – the process of interactive meaning-making that occurs within individuals and social groups. The other practical arena is the field of missiology – the changing theology of how evangelizing should be done by religious groups around the world.
I believe faith communities must give as much attention to the culture of dialogue as to the culture of mass media (news, advertising, entertainment). I believe it was Mark Twain who commented that he did not understand what prose was until he realized he had been speaking it all his life! People are in an interactive mode all their lives! This reality must be acknowledged along with the impact of mass media in popular culture.
These thoughts came into focus in new ways when I was invited to join the International Study Commission on Media, Religion and Culture. This small think-tank allowed rich dialogue and direct experiences with varied cultures as we met for a week annually around the world – in North America, Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe and in Eastern Europe. Especially helpful to me were the discussions where we stepped outside of Western cultural boxes.
Each member of the Commission continued their research and writing at their home base between our meetings, but then we were able to share these ideas when we met. For example Stewart Hoover directed a project called “Symbolism, Meaning, and the Lifecourse,” in which more than 250 persons were interviewed regarding how various kinds of families approach the media in their homes. This research demonstrated clearly that audience reception data showed we underestimate the rich interactivity occurring between audience members and varied media and popular culture content and formats. Permeating, underlying, all mass and individual reception are the processes of interactivity. Individuals and cultures are constantly engaged in the interactive task. And in religious and academic settings, when we do not understand, or when we ignore, these interactions we overlook much of what constitutes communication.
As I noted above, my own deep respect for two-way communication was established over twenty years ago during my Harvard/M.I.T. studies. Since then I have left behind a paper trail of reflection on aspects of interactivity in communication studies.3
The Development of Interactive Communication Systems
Figures 1-4 in the Appendix represent my attempts to ‘map’ roughly some of the developments of interactive communication systems. I use the term systems because various categories of this framework represent systemic changes rather than separate events, technologies, or idea patterns.
On these ‘maps’ I have placed various components (cultural structures and structures of social/religious thought) in relationship to emerging media formats as I try to hint at the links between the three categories. In many cases there are causal connections. However, often events and changes (especially in cultural structures), simply occur together with the media formats and social/religious thought patterns; there are not always provable direct causes, but the categories are often inter-related. It is also difficult at times to sort out and match timelines exactly.
What the proposed links do show is that the increasing diversity of media channels – especially those media formats that allow ‘talk-back’ – seems to facilitate a number of things: decentralization; economic, political, and religious liberation; and the decline of hierarchical authority structures, for example.
Figure 1 begins with a unified medieval Christendom in a feudal culture. All this changes, however, with the introduction of the medium of printing. As books become a commodity we see the ability of individuals to interact with ideas and specific writers; various sectors of society gain their own voice.
As the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution sweep over Western civilization, centralized religious authority is further weakened and multiple distribution channels – including transportation links – facilitate interactivity. As technologies empower the systematic increase of bureaucratic structures, churches themselves become more bureaucratic and, under Pius IX an attempt is made (through the Syllabus of Errors) to control Catholic thought and refute modernist tendencies. There is increased centralization throughout power cultures – financial systems, colonial empires, and media empires (networks). Churches increasingly use newer communication tools to evangelize, as they had done in the past – first with an oral tradition, then with schools and monasteries, and later with the printed text.
As talk-back forums and technologies develop (Figure 2), it becomes more difficult to control the communication content of inter- and intra-group exchanges. Liberation movements emerge and become stronger, fueled by “people-on-the-streets” power – people who are connected instantly by faxes, Emails, chat rooms, and cell phones. The Second Vatican Council renews (and re-formulates) Catholic Church teaching and Council theology articulates concepts like collegiality and the unique importance of the local (national, regional) Church leadership and voices. Global collaboratives emerge, fueled again by technological links that facilitate two-way communication and financial transactions and trade. Later, Vatican II renewal impetus slows and churches in Northern hemispheres experience loss of personnel and membership while religious communities grow rapidly in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. People in the Northern countries (many liberal and secular) are, even today, completely unaware of the growth of Christianity in these areas.
And yet, facing the challenge of many voices, central authorities in the West, like the former Soviet Union and the centralized core of the Catholic Church, are under siege – by liberal/conservative religious thought, but also by national- and ethnic-loyalty voices that grow louder as they become more interconnected within regions and across boundaries, much of this fueled by technology links.
These dialogic developments, and accompanying tensions, grow (Figures 3-4) as various media converge – computers linking with communication networks, along with the interface of satellite and telephone distribution systems. Ownership of media companies becomes concentrated even as communication messages increase and diversify. Political states also both converge (the European Union, trade zones, etc.), and break up into ethnic enclaves, with many wars erupting. Churches try to encourage peace, but their voices are muted by the scandal of division and tension among the religious groups themselves.
Our current late modern scene contains growing numbers of immigrants and refugees, a world-wide AIDS epidemic, especially devastating on the African continent, increased use of U.S. unilateral power in Iraq, and global church sex scandals. News media covering these events become increasingly interactive and argumentative. Internet use continues to grow, and mobile technology becomes widespread and smarter. Copyright issues focus on computerized video and audio distribution formats. The Al Jazeera news network, along with others, provides an interconnected focus for the Arab world. And, finally, blogs, My Space, and many similar sites, showcase millions of self-proclaimed producers of their own media.
Many religious groups reel under these cultural events, along with the challenge of the rapid spread of interactive communication technologies (a “digital culture”). Used to speaking authoritatively, they struggle to deal with a talk-back world.
Dialogue as Theory and Communicative Action
In a recent book, The Next Christendom, Philip Jenkins noted “…we are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide.” This transformation is occurring in the Southern hemisphere, far from the secularized, ‘liberated’ soil of the North (Europe, North America).4
Jenkins warns that the presence of many fundamentalist “non-democratic states with theocratic pretensions” means that by the year 2050 almost 20 of the 25 largest nations will be predominately either Christian or Muslim and at least ten of these nations will be the scene of intense conflict. This could well be “a new age of Christian crusades and Muslim jihads.”5
As I write, the world is experiencing more than 50 in-progress or recently concluded wars, many of them killing innocent civilians, engaging youth as combatants, and resulting in millions of refugees. Religious fervor fans many of these conflicts. These factors – and the hope that understanding dialogic processes can lead to communication, political, and religious breakthroughs – prompt me to continue the study of dialogic or two-way communication – both in theory and in practice.6
A work that has been helpful to me is Dominic Emmanuel’s study Challenges of Christian Communication and Broadcasting: Monologue or Dialogue? (Macmillan, 1999). Emmanuel traces the development of dialogic theory from interesting sources: Martin Buber’s relational I and Thou; the mystic Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian of the Communist era;7 and the work of Brenda Dervin and her colleagues8 in seeking a conceptual space within which to posit the task of dialogue – which they call a theory of ‘in between’ (based somewhat on Buber’s Between Man and Man).
Dialogical theory has been enriched, of course, by the contributions of German intellectuals Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method and the two-volume work of Jürgen Habermas entitled The Theory of Communicative Action. Emmanuel notes that both “argue for a life of dialogue and explain why dialogue is important for human life in modern democratic societies.” Key among Gadamer’s thoughts are concepts such as: the nature of interpretation; the phenomenon of understanding beyond exclusively scientific investigation; the need for receptivity or openness to the other’s tradition as a genuine partner in communication; the theme of the ‘fusion of horizons’ (of the other, of the past), opening up new horizons, like the ‘in-between’ of Buber and Dervin. Habermas, seeking the sources of reliable human knowledge, interacted with the work of Gadamer. Emmanuel notes “Habermas’s main work is an attempt to prove that ordinary use of language by competent speakers embodies within it a dialogical principle…”
The theory of communicative action of Habermas is intrinsically dialogical. Emmanuel explains that the theory of Habermas “makes a significant contribution to the understanding of dialogue, in that it proposes that one does not need to look for arbiters to conduct conversation or dialogue among individuals or communities, but that the language uttered for fundamental communication in everyday social transactions, embodies in itself the very principle of dialogue”.
In his chapter, “The Reception of Doctrine: New Perspectives”9 the theologian Richard Gaillardetz proposes a new dialogical model of doctrinal teaching and the reception of this teaching. (I have often thought that the reception of church doctrine, like reception of media program material, often yields surprises for the producers of the doctrine). Gaillardetz notes: “Habermas came to see the emancipatory power of human communication. It is only through authentic communication that we can overcome the alienation which is endemic to our modern world.”10 Gaillardetz concludes: “… the acid test for any community is not harmony but how differences of opinion and even division are handled within the community.”11
The Infrastructure of Dialogue: Networks
While the theory of dialogue is enriched by Buber, Dervin, Gadamer, Habermas and others, dialogic infrastructures are growing everywhere like a variety of flowers in a well-tended garden. I like to think of these as ‘webs of significance’ or ‘webs of inclusion’, as the business consultant Sally Helgesen refers to them. If we ‘think link’, all varieties of networks come to mind:
computer internets and intranets
mass media networks that are satellite- and telephone-linked
prolific chat forums, blogs, MySpace-type arenas, podcasts
talking back to TV/radio/film through call-ins, blogs, and Email reactions
market-transaction networks from large corporate transactions to E-bay sales
24/7 stock market transactions
military defense and surveillance systems
data base links that contain our credit card transactions or medical records
increasing mobile network links
ubiquitous cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs)
Networking, under different names, has been occurring for many centuries. The Roman and British Empires were certainly networks. Various faith communities are networks. What has changed, of course, is the facilitation of networking through recent interactive communication technologies like those mentioned above. We are beginning to see thoughtful evaluations of the impact of widespread dialogical networks as they permeate and alter our cultural habits.
Jon Alterman has written New Media, New Politics: From Satellite Technology to the Internet in the Arab World, a publication of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He notes that even mid-level communication technologies have internationalized local politics. The role of audio cassettes from Paris in fomenting the Iranian Revolution is quite well known.
Now, however, the fact that news emerges easily from global sources like on-the-spots blogs means one can ‘work’ politics (and, I might add, religious and cultural messages) from anywhere in the world. This can build loyalties that go way beyond national borders – for example for Iranians, Jews, Asian, Hispanic, or Ukrainian diaspora groups dispersed around the world. With increased public discussion and Internet sites, everyone competes for idea-coverage and some bad ideas surface. In conflict, peoples’ appetite for information increases. This may seem to go ‘downhill’ as entertainment intervenes, but the widespread dispersion of entertainment formats also changes cultural content and boundaries.
The concept of being ‘boundaryless’ is addressed by Stanford Law professor Lawrence Friedman in his work The Horizontal Society (Yale University Press, 1999). He states:
In modern society, identity (and authority) is much more horizontal… modern men and women are much freer to form relationships that are on a plane of equality (real or apparent) – relationships with peers, with like-minded people… We are becoming ‘fluid and many-sided,’ evolving a ‘sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of ‘our times’ – a sense of self that Robert Jay Lifton has called ‘protean.’12
Friedman notes that “(a) horizontal group becomes a kind of nation when it generates a strong sense of belonging and demands a high level of commitment”, like ‘The Nation of Islam’. The Internet, of course, makes linking among horizontal groups easy and instantaneous.
This clearly has religious implications:
The horizontal society has weakened two pillars of religious identity: first, that religion is truly a heritage, something given as a birthright and not to be abandoned casually … and second, that one’s religion is the One True Faith. The latter is still official dogma in some religions, but it is not what many people really believe. The chief dogma of the horizontal society is individual choice.13
As one seeks both unity and diversity, the concept of ‘plural equality’ emerges and Friedman asks: Can this work? He notes that many rainbow coalitions are nothing but talk; plural equality at the level of culture and ideology is more difficult. He cites as successes, Singapore, and the federal republic of Switzerland. He guesses that “each country has its own chemical reaction to plural equality… there must be, perhaps, some kind of minimal, but binding, identity.”
Freidman points to the consequences of the horizontal society:
it has been created by mass media, transport, and modernity
authority tends to merge with celebrity status
this affects, at the deepest level, a person’s sense of self
this society is a society on the move since messages get to remote areas
the society is divided into identity groups
Practical Considerations
I have selected two arenas where practical applications exist as we look at interactivity ‘on the ground.’ Both represent large ideas that perhaps many have not considered thoughtfully enough.
The first is the theory (and reality) of mediation, as proposed by Jesús Martin-Barbero.14 Martin-Barbero’s challenging work notes that audiences interact – to some extent even control or mediate – mass media content and impact. He notes: “Now the masses, with the help of technology, feel nearer to even the most remote and sacred things. Their perception carries a demand for equality that is the basic energy of the masses.”15
One example of the power of interactivity is cited by Martin-Barbero. In a poor slum of Lima, a group of women attempted to organize the marketplace better. “…they found a tape recorder and some loudspeakers… the women began to use the tape recorder to interview people of the neighborhood as to what they thought about the market and to provide music and celebrations… they were criticized by a person of higher status, a nun, who ridiculed the way they talked… some of the women went to the communication center to announce dejectedly, ‘We discovered that the nun was right… But we also have understood that with the help of this little machine we can learn how to speak.’ And from that day the women of the market decided to tell stories about their own lives. They no longer used the recorder just to listen to others but they began to use it to learn how to speak.16 This incident reminds me of the revolutionary work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire.
The second grassroots application of interactivity or dialogue that interests me needs a lot more reflection than I can give it here. When you read more about respecting local cultures and local theologies and the staggering growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, one becomes aware of the need for re-thinking the evangelization procedures of religious groups. One work has been very helpful: The Church and Cultures: New Perspectives in Missiological Anthropology (Orbis, 1988) by Louis J. Luzbetak..
Missiology is a form of applied anthropology, and the Church is clearly an agent of cultural change. When Christianity interacts with local cultures there is a missiological dilemma. Often this results in dual religious systems operating alongside each other. (One hot-button area today is work being done by theologians attempting to write about Christ and other religions/cultures). Luzbetak provides a helpful summary of missiological applications when conditions do favor change.17
Conclusions
An underlying issue of the current U.S. Catholic Church crisis (in addition to sexual abuse victim pain), is the predominately one-way communication culture of the church’s organizational leadership. As the church renews itself, lay people will insist on being heard; leadership will be pressured to listen, especially by digital and dialogic media oversight. My reflections here have pointed to the need to recognize the interactive fabric of media, religion, and culture. We have reviewed the historical development of communication/media interactivity, along with accompanying cultural structures and structures of social/religious thought. We have considered how dialogue theory has been enriched by the work of individuals like Buber, Bakhtin, Gadamer, Habermas, and Brenda Dervin and her research team. We have also looked at emerging analysis of horizontal networks on political activity, personal sense of self and the result of bonded (sometimes exclusive) identity groups. Two specific examples include the importance of mediation in audience reception and the different approaches to evangelization (missiology) in the light of newer respect for grassroots cultures and feedback.
All this needs to be studied in the context of global religion, especially the growing numbers and the strong force of religious identity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. At its foundation, much of this is a power/dominance issue. There is a need for the growth process around the world to be socially informed, rather than demand based. Everett Rogers and Lawrence Kincaid put it another way: “… the capacity to develop and manage communication networks is an important prerequisite for self-sustaining socio-economic development over time.”18
Endnotes
1 This is just one of several helpful Eilers volumes.
2 Pool had, himself, done some writing on DBS issues, but the theoretical questions were transformed in the late 1970s when the Communication Satellite Corporation (Comsat) announced its intention to develop DBS. I was pleased that Pool wanted to reconsider his own satellite ideas through my dissertation research.
3 See the References list for some of my writings on the issue of dialogue in communication.
4 Jenkins notes that as we assembled retrospective lists approaching the twenty-first century “the attitude seemed to be, what religious change in recent years could possibly compete in importance with the major secular trends, movements like fascism or communism, feminism or environmentalism? To the contrary, I suggest that it is precisely religious changes that are the most significant, and even the most revolutionary, in the contemporary world. Before too long, the turn-of-the-millennium neglect of religious factors may be economically myopic, on a par with the review of the eighteenth century that managed to miss the French Revolution”. Of course, for Americans, the impact of the religious right in politics, and the 9/11 attack, brought religion to everyone’s attention.
5 Jenkins argues: “Over the past century … the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. … If we want to visualize a ‘typical’ contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela. … (By the year 2025) there (will) be around 2.6 billion Christians, of whom 633 million would live in Africa, 640 million in Latin America, and 460 million in Asia. Europe, with 555 million would have slipped to third place” p 2.
6 Four books have been especially helpful to me in practical ways: The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict Into Cooperation, by Daniel Yankelovich, Simon and Schuster, 1999; Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, by William Isaacs, Doubleday, 1999; Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church: Aims and Obstacles, Lessons and Laments, by Bradford Hinze, Continuum, 2006; and The Art of Dialogue: Religion, Communication and Global Media Culture, by Ineke de Feijter, Transaction Publishers, 2006.
7 See Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, by Tzvetan Todorov, Manchester University Press, 1984.
8 Brenda Dervin, John Higgins, Robert Huesca, Tony Osborne, Priya Jaikumar-Mahey, “Toward a Communication Theory of Dialogue,” Media Development, XL, 2, pp. 54-61 (1993).
9 The Gaillardetz chapter is in Authority in the Roman Catholic Church, edited by Bernard Hoose, Ashgate, 2002, pp 95-117.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 The Horizontal Society, p 5.
13 Ibid., p 228.
14 These ideas are discussed extensively in Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, Sage, 1993, translated by Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White.
15 Ibid., p 48.
16 Ibid, p 186.
17 See pp 351-359.
18 Communication Networks: Toward a New Paradigm for Research, Everett M. Rogers and D. Lawrence Kincaid.
References
de Feijter, Ineke (2006) The Art of Dialogue: Religion, Communication and Global Media Culture, London: Transaction Publishers.
Friedman, Lawrence M. (1999) The Horizontal Society, New Haven, Yale University Press.
Gaillardetz, Richard (2002) “The Reception of Doctrine: New Perspectives”, in Authority in the Roman Catholic Church, ed. Bernard Hoose, Ashgate.
Hinze, Bradford (2006) Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church: Aims and Obstacles, Lessons and Laments, New York: Continuum.
Isaacs, William (1999) Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, New York: Doubleday.
Martin-Barbero, Jesús (1993) Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, Sage.
Plude, Frances Forde (1989) “The Potential for Solidarity in Local and Global Networks”, in Communication Ethics and Global Change: National and International Perspectives, Ed. Thomas Cooper, White Plains, Longman.
Plude, Frances Forde (1992) “Modern Communications vs. centralized power”. The Syracuse Record, April 13.
Plude, Frances Forde (1994) “Interactive Communications in the Church”, in The Church and Communication, Patrick Granfield, ed., Kansas City: Sheed and Ward.
Plude, Frances Forde (1996) “Forums for Dialogue: Teleconferencing and the American Catholic Church”, in Media, Culture and Catholicism, Paul A. Soukup, ed., Kansas City: Sheed and Ward.
Plude, Frances Forde (2001) “Telecommunication Networks: Impacts on Communication Flows and Organizational Structures (Including Religious Institutions)”, in Cultura y Medios de Communicación, University of Salamanca.
Plude, Frances Forde (2005) “L’interactivité de la communication: un signe des temps”, in Témoigner de sa foi dans les médias, aujourd’hui, Ed. Guy Marchessault, Les Presses de l’Universite d’Ottawa.
Pool, Ithiel de Sola (1977) The Social Impact of the Telephone, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pool, Ithiel de Sola (1983) Technologies of Freedom, Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Rogers, Everett and D. Lawrence Kincaid (1981) Communication Networks: Toward a New Paradigm for Research, New York: Free Press.
Yankelovich, Daniel (1999) Transforming Conflict Into Cooperation, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Appendix
4 GRIDS Showing Development of Interactive Communication Systems
Figure 1
CENTRALIZED PERIODS
Constructed by Frances Forde Plude
Figure 2: Development of Interactive Communication Systems
DECENTRALIZED PHASES (1960s TO DATE)
Constructed by Frances Forde Plude
Figure 3: Development of Interactive Communication Systems
GROWTH OF DIALOGIC THEORY AND STRUCTURESz
Constructed by Frances Forde Plude
Figure 4: Development of Interactive Communication Systems
A POSTMODERN VIEW
Constructed by Frances Forde Plude
