Vizualinis religingumas kibernetinėje erdvėje
Visual religiousness in the cyberspace

Summary/Abstract: Summary The article surveys and summarizes the impact of modern technologies on the discourse of religious communication, shifting away from the verbal mediation and meditation to various interactive audio-visual representations. On the other hand, it is equally interesting and important to examine how secular media apply the advantages of the long-lived tradition of religious communication. These problems are approached through the analysis of such notions of religious tradition as myth and ritual, which in turn provoke the question in what ways modern technologies influence the traditional forms of symbolic religious communication. The analysis shows that while modern media open up new horizons for spreading the religious message, its content is strictly subordinated to the general conventions of media practice. Thirdly, the functionalist understanding of religion enables us to see how media establish and maintain quasi-religious communities. The theoretical argumentation of the article is abundantly illustrated with examples from the spheres of television and the internet.

• Details
• Contents