Social Anthropology

News agency and news mediation in the digital era

This essay discusses anthropological approaches to the study of media interacting with contexts of ethnic and religious diversity. The main argument is that not only issues of access to and exclusion from public spheres are relevant for an understanding of media and pluralism. Background assumptions and ideologies about media technologies and their functioning also require more comparative analysis, as they impact public spheres and claims to authority and authenticity that ultimately produce and shape scenarios of ethnic and religious diversity. This additional dimension of diversity in the question of media and ethnic and religious pluralism is particularly apparent in crises of political and religious mediation. The latter often result in desires to bypass established forms of political and religious mediation that are in turn often projected on new media technologies.

Taking as a starting point the paradox that immediacy is not prior to, but rather a product of mediation, this article argues that the negotiation of newly available media technologies is key to the transformation of religion. Invoked to authorise sensations of spiritual powers as immediate and real, media are prone to ‘disappear’ or become ‘hyper‐apparent’ in the act of mediation. I argue that a view of media as intrinsic to religion requires a fundamental critique of approaches of both religion and media that posit an opposition between media and immediacy.

Taking as a point of departure the Pentecostal use of digital world maps, this article argues that Pentecostal movements should be understood as part and parcel of contemporary convergence culture. A reading of the remediations of the Brazilian Pentecostal church – the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD) – demonstrates that the simulacrum of global evangelical presence as put forward by the IURD is supported by the interplay between the desire for immediacy and the experience of hypermediacy, but also by the close resemblance between common expectations of new media and the prophetic drive towards a global community of Christians.

Taking its examples from the realm of popular religion and popular culture, this essay shows how sensations of im‐mediacy are sought and produced in a great number of fantasy scripts. Some of these scripts seek to undo media‐awareness: concealing or denying the involvement of the human hand they produce the sensation that one's imaginations are not human fabrications at all, but immanent to the world. Other scripts, however, flauntingly reveal the mediation process and the workings of the human hand in it. Yet on closer inspection, these latter scripts oftentimes throw into relief the moment where – all the awareness of the medium notwithstanding – the mediation process is transcended. The cases discussed help the author to ponder the place of the medium in what he calls ‘the cultural production of the really real’.

Response to Charles Hirschkind
Religion and transduction