Seite - 10 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 07/02

10 | Philippe Bornet, Stefanie Knauss, and Alexander D. Ornella www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 7–14 producer of an image or its “owner”, as Bornet also notes. The blurring of the roles of media creators and consumers, expressed in the study of dig- ital media in the term “prod-use/prod-user”,8 thus has, perhaps, a longer prehistory than imagined. In a more contemporary context, the productive ambiguity between media producer and consumer is apparent in Loukili’s contribution, where the consumption of media (here, mainstream news) is directly related to, and even a part of, the production of media as a resistant discourse. While digital media, the focus of Loukili’s analysis, seem to open up new possibilities in terms of media production, accessibility, and consumption, they also raise further critical questions that need attention: Do they pro- vide tools for more equitable access to distant or even global audiences and the production of local narratives and thus represent sites of postcolonial agency, or do they, on the contrary, reproduce old colonial asymmetries?9 Are religious authorities contested through the broader participation in content production, or are they instead reinforced? Can digital media be- come, as Loukili argues, a means to “talk back” against mainstream me- dia and religious or social institutions, and their images of the internal or external other, and a space for alternative socio-religious discourses and political agency to develop? Or do the logics of digital media, and perhaps in particular of social media, lend themselves to tendencies of polarization and populism, as we can also observe across the world? The focus on the particular emphasized in methodologies inspired by post- colonial theory as a means to avoid the universalization of a single (western) perspective is also helpful in media studies. Attention to a specific medium can provide insight into the complexities of its production and reception contexts, and the way in which political and religious authority might have been associated with a medium and its use in the (post)colonial situation. For example, how did the predominantly written culture of post-Enlight- enment Europe, with its particular forms of argumentation, rationality, knowledge production and conservation, and narrative memorialization fa- vor the imperialistic ambitions of western powers?10 The wide dissemination of textual material and the associated changes in media consumption (such 8 Bruns 2007. 9 See for example Sundaram 2009, about digital piracy as a way to overcome these asymme- tries, which also challenges the above-mentioned notions of property and ownership. 10 See Goody 1986 for an anthropological analysis of the impact of writing on societies and religions.