Within religion being online,
there are some traits called Network Religion that can be identified on every
platform and every environment that the internet has provided for this religion
to act on. For my study of prayer on Facebook there is one of the traits from Network Religion
that really sticks out to me and that is Network Community. The Network
Community is the 'idea of network religion... emerges within a distinctive
social sphere constructed of networked interactions" and it forms an
online community (Campbell, p. 5). This trait has the idea around it that
members of a certain platform or website can come together to create an online
community being involved and getting to know other people. Though it can go
deeper to see how people function offline as well, but my study does not go as deep
as that does. My study looking at people all over the world coming together
online, I have no way to prove how it can affect them offline. We can see
though that the loose social boundaries set up on both of my sites allow anyone
to join the group as long as they follow the rules that are set up by the director
of the page. Even though the site itself is has loose boundaries, people have
made the site fit their needs and they have give a few rules to play by so the
community if formed around a few basic rules. An example from my case study
that I have been looking into is that when people post on the wall, non are
left unlike or uncommented upon. They have been a support group for anyone who
has posted on the wall. The people who also post feel open enough to give
updates and reports on how their prayer request is turning out. The community
of back and forth conversation is encouraging to people who see the post and
want to feel welcomed into the group as well.
Storied Identity is another trait that I can
see being played out in the group. It is not as strong, but people that post on
this Facebook pages are finding who they are and finding themselves in a group
that has supporters for them. People that feel alone need someone to talk to
and the group being open to anyone posting about anything needing prayer, you
can see that a person could find themselves at peace, togetherness and in some senses
a family. This are just a few traits that are brought up in the Network
Religion, and we could probably find a little of each of the 5 network religion
theories in every platform. But Network Community and Storied Identity is two
of the strongest ones that I can tell from my observations.
No comments:
Post a Comment