Longhurst, Bagnall, Savage, “Place, Elective Belonging, & the Diffused Audience”

The opening sentence: “The changing nature of social and cultural life requires a new understanding of interconnections among types of audience experience, simple, mass, and diffused” (125). I didn’t really engage with a study on cinema in places I’ve never been. But it’s an interesting thesis, nonetheless. It’s true that our economic status and geographical location play a role in our engagement (and what we think about our engagement, and what we think about others’ engagement) with culture and society. We as the church need to be aware of these interconnections and work to bend and mend them, always looking for ways to build those bridges–highly complicated in our uncategorical society.