On studying religion, media and the young people

Abstract

This paper charts a unique and important phase of media use and meaning-making processes among young people during the first decade of twenty-first century. The rapid changes in media content and consumption have brought about a transformation which impacts on forms of religion and spirituality for young people. In this article I review four studies on the field of religion and the media. Key concepts of the construction of individuality and the narrative of personal biographies are found in all of them. The role of Evangelical Christianity and the core narrative of the apocalypse, as well as the clear polarities of good and evil are analysed in two of the studies which give a description of the global and transnational dimension, while the other two put more emphasis on the local, cultural and historical dimensions. The significance of the transnational character of religious narratives, the media and popular culture is analysed in reference to a long period of ethnographical inquiry and detailed documentations of the cultural discourses associated with musical subcultures as well as the locality and new media conventions approach in the studies of existential and religious expressions in the mediated environment.