ON THE MEANING AND VALIDITY OF TELEVISION VIEWING

The construct validity of “television viewing” is developed and explicated. It is suggested that while this concept is usually used as a strict behavioral variable, many different constructs are implied by it. The construct validity of television viewing can be derived from a conceptualization of what it is in television which, when viewed, or exposed to, interacts with human behavior and attributes. Four such conceptualizations are illustrated, each leading to a different construct of “viewing”: (1) television as a social-situational factor involving choice behavior between activities; (2) television as a transmission of a content repertoire, implying decision-making regarding messages; (3) television as a source of content-messages dealing with recall, comprehension, and attitude change; and (4) television as a “language” pertaining to the processes of encoding messages in the service of extracting knowledge.     

RELIGION,SCIENCE, AND NATURE: SHIFTS IN MEANING ON A CHANGING PLANET

Abstract This article explores how religion and science, as worlding practices, are changed by the processes of globalization and global climate change. In the face of these processes, two primary methods of meaning making are emerging: the logic of globalization and planetary assemblages. The former operates out of the same logic as extant axial age religions, the Enlightenment, and Modernity. It is caught up in the process of universalizing meanings, objective truth, and a single reality. The latter suggests that the processes of globalization and climate change break open any universalizing attempt at meaning onto a proliferation of different, evolving planetary contexts. Both science and religion are affected by these changes, and the ways in which they shape our understandings of and relationship to the rest of the natural world are changed.