American television fiction transforming Danish teenagers' religious imaginations
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Line Nybro Petersen
Abstract
This paper argues that American television fiction with supernatural themes offers Danish teenage audiences a playground for exploring different religious imaginations in a continuous process of internal negotiations; thereby transforming their imaginations. This process of the mediatization of religion is strengthened by three dominating factors: the absence of a homogenous religious worldview in Danish culture, the importance of high production values and visual credibility to supernatural concepts in these shows, and the appeal of transformed religious content in open-structured serial narratives. This essay presents the findings of an empirical qualitative study of seventy-two Danish teenagers and considers two primary parameters for the case-based reception study: the teenagers' levels of fandom and their connection with institutionalized religion. In other words, how are religious imaginations transformed in relation to viewers' level of commitment to the television fiction and to traditional institutionalized religion?
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
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Articles in the same Issue
- Mediatization – Empirical perspectives: An introduction to a special issue
- American television fiction transforming Danish teenagers' religious imaginations
- Repercussion and resistance. An empirical study on the interrelation between science and mass media
- The mediatization of the knowledge based economy: An Australian field based account
- Mediatization in context: Consensus culture, media and decision making in the 21st century, the case of Finland
- Personalization according to politicians: A practice theoretical analysis of mediatization
- Mediati(zi)ng EU politics: Online news coverage of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections
