Digital Media, Young Adults and Religion

An International Perspective

Marcus Moberg, Sofia Sjö, Marcus Moberg, Sofia Sjö

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138541610
• eBook ISBN: 9781351010597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

It has become increasingly clear that an adequate understanding of the contemporary processes of social, cultural, and religious change is contingent on an appreciation of the growing impact of social media. Utilising results of an unprecedented global study, this volume explores the ways in which young adults in seven different countries engage with digital and social media in religiously significant ways.

Presenting and analysing the findings of the global research project Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (YARG), an international panel of contributors shed new light on the impact of social media and its associated technologies on young people's religiosities, worldviews, and values. Case studies from China, Finland, Ghana, Israel, Peru, Poland, and Turkey are used to demonstrate how these developments are progressing, not just in the West, but across the world.

This book is unique in that it presents a truly macroscopic perspective on trends in religion amongst young adults. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars working in religious studies, digital media, communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, theology and youth studies.

Part I

Theoretical and methodological perspectives

1 Introduction

Young adults, religion, and digital media in international perspective

Marcus Moberg and Sofia Sjö, with Mia Lövheim

We live in a media saturated world. Ongoing advances in digital information and communications technologies have made our present-day media and communications environment progressively more interactive, mobile, and convergent – a development epitomized in the proliferation of digital social media (e.g. Dwyer 2010). These developments have propelled an accelerating general process of “digitalization,” whereby digital media and their associated technologies have started to underpin social structures and occupy an increasingly ubiquitous presence in both public and private everyday life. As a result, these developments have also greatly affected contemporary modes of religious life and practice. While the impact of social media can be observed across much of the religious spectrum, it has become particularly notable in relation to the religious engagements and practices of the present young adult generation – varyingly coupled together under labels such as “Internet generation,” “media generation,” or “digital natives” – for whom social media and their associated technologies often constitute an ever-present and taken-for-granted part of everyday life (e.g. Barnes et al. 2007; Oblinger 2003; Tapscott 2008). Although the heuristic value of the labels mentioned has been questioned, current research in the area has been rather uniform in its emphasis on the importance of media and mobile communication technologies when it comes to the religiosities, religious outlooks, worldviews, and values of younger generations (Smith and Snell 2009; Barry et al. 2010; Collins-Mayo and Beaudoin 2010; Yip and Page 2013; Bobkowski 2014). Young people today grow up in and become socialized into a culture marked by a fast-changing global media environment that offers them previously unforeseen opportunities to come across, search out, and engage with virtually any existing religious/spiritual (or nonreligious) teaching, idea, or practice.

The present volume aims to contribute to current research on young adults, religion, the Internet, and social media on both a theoretical and an empirical level. The volume is based on the unique body of data that was gathered as part of the international research project Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective: A Cross-Cultural, Comparative and Mixed-Method Study of Religious Subjectivities and Values in their Context (YARG 2015–2019), based at the Department of the Study of Religions at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. The YARG project was a mixed-method research venture that explored the values and religious subjectivities of young adult university students (primarily ages 18–30) in 13 different contexts across the world (Canada, China, Finland, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Peru, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States). The project gathered an extensive new body of data through the systematic combination of quantitative and qualitative research instruments. These included (1) a general survey (minimum N=300/country, total sample N=4964) containing items on social values, religion, and media use; (2) the widely validated Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ, minimum N=300/country); (3) the Faith Q-Sort (FQS, minimum N=45/country), a new instrument specifically developed for the study of contemporary religious subjectivities; and (4) semi-structured thematic interviews (minimum N=45/country). YARG is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 of this volume.

The YARG project focused its analysis on four main thematic areas, one of which was the impact of the present-day media environment, especially digital media, on the religious subjectivities and worldviews of young adult university students. The data provides extensive amounts of new information on the religiosities and media habits of young adults around the world with the potential to enrich existing research and provide new openings for the exploration of previously understudied areas. The truly international character of the body of data gathered in the project also allows for both case-specific and comparative analyses that extend well beyond Western contexts. Based on this new body of data, this volume includes detailed explorations of a large variety of different ways in which young adults’ digital media use and various types of religious engagements intersect in seven different national, social, cultural, and religious contexts—those of China, Finland, Ghana, Israel, Peru, Poland, and Turkey.

The expanding field of religion, media, and digital culture

The past few decades have witnessed the emergence of a rapidly growing and expanding scholarship on religion, the Internet, and digital culture. This scholarship is typically described as having developed in four principal (although partly overlapping) successive stages or “waves” of research that have largely reflected the progressive expansion of the Internet and continuous developments in digital technologies (e.g. Campbell 2013b: 64–65; Campbell and Lövheim 2017). While earlier “first wave” research was largely explorative in character and mainly centered on the mapping of various types of religious content and the presence of religious communities online, “second wave” research instead became decidedly more focused on the ways in which religious community and practice was actually configured and performed online. “Third wave” research then shifted the focus to how “offline” religious life in general was becoming increasingly affected by digital technologies and the extension of offline religious practice through various online platforms. Finally, “fourth wave” research has continued to expand along these lines, focusing in particular on the many new forms of interplay that are emerging between online and offline religious practice through the proliferation of social media and mobile digital communication technologies (Campbell 2013a: 60–61; Campbell and Vitullo 2016: 74; Campbell and Lövheim 2017).

The scholarly literature on religion and digital media and culture has continued to expand and diversify and come to include, among other things, a book series (Routledge’s Studies in Religion and Digital Culture) and a journal (Brill’s Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture) devoted to the subject, several broad-scope edited volumes and journal special issues outlining key debates, concepts, perspectives, and types of analyses in the field (e.g. Campbell 2013b; Campbell and Lövheim 2017), as well as detailed monographs focusing on the relation between digital media and particular types of religions or religious communities (e.g. Campbell 2010; Hutchins 2017; Bunt 2009; Kołodziejska 2018; Evolvi 2018a). To date, a few volumes have also displayed a somewhat more sustained focus on social media (e.g. Cheong et al. 2012; Gillespie et al. 2013), concentrating both on the various types of religious content that can be found on and across large and widely used social media platforms and on the various social media engagements of religious communities themselves. Thus far, however, no volume has been produced that specifically considers the impact of the present-day digital and social media environment on the religious/spiritual outlooks and practices of the present-day young adult generation.

Apart from a few notable exceptions (e.g. Han et al. 2015; Kolodsjewska 2018; Radde-Antweiler and Zeiler 2018), the scholarship to date has also mainly been limited to studies of Western contexts (i.e. Europe and North America) and the most widely known and globally diffused social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. This reflects a broader “Anglo-centric bias” (Thussu 2009) of academic fields such as media studies and social computing more generally, coupled with the fact that many of the most globally dispersed and researched social media platforms have originated in Silicon Valley and initially become established in the United States and the Western world. The bulk of all previous research on social media has also been predominantly focused on so-called WEIRD populations, i.e. “those residing in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and developed countries” (Burgess et al. 2017: 3). For example, through a series of large-scale surveys, the Pew Center for the Study of the Internet and American Life (est. 2004) has produced considerable and valuable bodies of data on the social media habits of American populations, including on religion-related matters (Miller et al. 2016: 18). While a recent Pew Research Center study (2018a) offers an overview of Internet and social media use in 39 contexts across the globe, in-depth data on non-Western contexts and populations still remains rather scarce.

Approaching social media

Today, social media occupy an increasingly integral and taken-for-granted part of everyday life for growing numbers of people on an international scale (e.g. Tagg and Seargeant 2017: 213). Preceded by, as well as building on, a set of previous terms designed to distinguish digital “new media” from previous broadcast and print media (such as “cyberspace” in the 1990s or “digital media” and “Web 2.0” in the mid-2000s), the term “social media” became more widely popularized and integrated into colloquial language around the year 2008 (Walker Rettberg 2017: 435). It is not unusual for scholarly accounts to either directly or indirectly paint a picture of social media as something that constitutes a specific (and, at the time of writing, latest) “phase” in a broader, ongoing evolution of mobile digital communications. However, while new social media platforms obviously build on previous technologies and uses of the Internet for social and communicative purposes, there are “clearly as many discontinuities with prior uses of the Internet as continuities” (Miller et al. 2016: 11). For these reasons, Miller et al. (2016: 11) argue that social media need to be considered a topic of research in and of itself and no longer be considered the “latest point in a narrative” of developments in Internet and digital technologies.

While social media still tends to be most commonly associated with large and globally dispersed so-called “social networking sites” (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter, the category of social media can be taken to encompass a much larger collection of different types and forms of sites, platforms, groupware, and mobile applications (Burgess et al. 2017: 3). In its broadest sense, the term “social media” can therefore be taken to denote “those digital platforms, services and apps built around the convergence of content sharing, public communication, and interpersonal connection” (Burgess et al. 2017: 1).

In their influential and oft-cited earlier work on developments in social media, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010: 60) highlighted the emergence and proliferation of platforms that were deliberately designed to facilitate the dissemination of various types of “user-generated content” (UGC), i.e. various types of creative content “published either on a publicly accessible website or on a social networking site accessible to a selected group of people” (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010: 61; cf. Leppänen et al. 2017: 8). While social media still continues to be widely used for such purposes, several more recently developed platforms have instead been purposely designed to enable ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Part I Theoretical and methodological perspectives
• Part II Applications and cases
• Appendix: Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (YARG) Project Survey
• Bibliography
• Index