Faith in the net: towards the creation of digital networks of religious acknowledgement and recognition

• Main Author: Luis Ignacio SIERRA GUTIÉRREZ
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Etudes Scientifiques Spécialisées Appliquées aux Communications Humaines, Economiques, Sociales et Symboliques 2017-12-01
• Series: Essachess
• Subjects: Internet; social networks; religious digital networks; social practices and social interaction; recognition
• Online Access: http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/article/view/390/436
• ISSN: 1775-352X; 2066-5083

Undoubtedly, the technological revolution in information and communications causing major changes in citizens’ social interactions. The new reticular rationality offers the possibility of shaping, developing, and strengthening social networks and virtual communities. All of them facilitate the creation of new interactive spaces, new social collectives promoting citizenship and that, from different social fields and levels of experience, articulate and streamline processes of production, circulation and appropriation of new symbolic products. Such products contribute not only to generating new sources of knowledge but, above all, to strengthening processes of citizen interaction. In such processes, the field of media, religiosities and socio-cultural processes are strategically intertwined. In this context, experiences of civic religiosity find in the potential generated by the global network, new possibilities of interaction and religious recognition. Also new forms and spaces to share plural options of faith and socio-religious practices that make sense of the existence of cybernauts. This text is divided into three parts: First, critically contextualizes the global phenomenon of social networks. Second, it makes an approximation to some experiences of digital networks of religious recognition from Latin America. Finally, raises some questions that arise from such virtual practices.