Religion as communication in the digital age

Abstract

In the digital age, the social sciences of religion have begun to face the problem of studying a new complex phenomenon: religious communication mediated by the computer. Sociology needs to find instruments, categories and methodologies to nalyze it. In this essay we focus on the state of the art of the phenomenon, discussing the terminology, and suggesting a classification methodology and a few reading guidelines.Indeed the cyberspace it is not a matter of bringing order into the “meaningless infinity of the real”, but of bearing in mind that the realities are at least two and that, from many points of view, they not always belong to the same “world”. The notion of religion offers rigid socio-linguistic evidences to the researcher, perhaps ill-suited to study virtual communities of belief, with ephemeral and changing boundaries, groups ofpeople meeting only in the Net, without any real connection with each other.