Religion in the Media Age: A Philosophy of Communication Review

Abstract

Religion becomes the best-selling commodity in the Media Age. The media is the marketplace for religions where every actor can freely sell his perspective. People of the market are also abundant along with media literacy in all circles, not only adults but also millennial groups. People search for religious content in the media pro-actively. It was not the time for a preacher to call out loudly to be heard, precisely the audience who actively sought out their favorite new media or internet-based media. This condition presents a new pattern of communication between the community and the religious authority, the preachers with the audience, and among community members who have been flooded with religious information from various online sources. As an effort to understand the pattern of communication between religious communities in the media age, a more entrenched review is needed. Therefore, a philosophical approach is significant. The Philosophy of Communication was chosen in this study because it is the most appropriate approach that deeply reviewed the discourse of communicability and community and discourse of difference and subjectivity. Borrowing the communicability theory of Immanuel Kant, this study found that people in the Media Age still have the same sense of the ideal role of religion. This sense must have supposed to unite religious communities. However, this study also found that the media at the same time become the main cause of differences so that subjectivity became a tug-of-war strength that broke the religious community. After reviewing the discourse, this study closed with an offer of a solution by employing Jurgen Habermas theory of Communicative Society. This solution is believed to be appropriate especially to the tendency of the people in the Media Age who more oriented towards postmodernism than modernism.