Media, identity, and the environment: Popular religiosity and 'spectacular nature'.

摘要

What does it mean that people may be increasingly drawing their conceptions of nature from their television and other media sources? Prompted by a desire to learn more about the human connection to the natural world—a relationship that has been implicated in the steady degradation of the environment—the author analyzed a series of conversations with families along Colorado's Front Range. These interviews were conducted as part of the Symbolism, Media, and the Lifecourse Project under the direction of Dr. Stewart M. Hoover in the University of Colorado-Boulder's School of Journalism and Mass Communication Research. The Lifecourse Project utilizes the theoretical and methodological stance of a research approach known as constructivism. From the constructivist perspective, the author found those he interviewed willing and able to engage in long conversations about notions of the environment/nature. Further, in the discussions, these individuals attempted to make a presentation of themselves using meanings of the environment/nature, and mediated discourses about the environment/nature were often used as a stand-ins for experience with ‘real’ environment/nature. This research indicates that what has been titled ‘mediated spectacular nature’, a genre criticized for its detached, exoticized, commodified representation of the natural world (e.g., National Geographic magazine, Disney films, Wild Kingdom, Jacques Cousteau, and more recent and increasingly popular Discovery Channel and Animal Planet programming), provides a rich source of meanings for its audiences. But that begs the question: what kind of meanings are they. Is there ideological determination in evidence here that jeopardizes the welfare of the Earth, or is it better to think of the genre in terms of its religious use, or both? We can only begin to answer that question by first exploring liberal-pluralist, postmodern, critical, and antimodern perspectives that have attempted to make sense of human relations, especially in relation to media and the environment/nature.; In the end, it is argued that, rather than thinking of mediated spectacular nature as a religion, it is more helpful to understanding to consider the way it is a bundle of both limiting and enabling discourses that serve as resources for the practice of a public religiosity of the environment.