Research On The New Form Of Religious Activities On Mobile Internet

In the time of mobile internet,the practice of cyber-religion has shown the new characters which are high interaction and high participation.11 Chinese Buddhism relevant groups have been observed and 12 Buddhist monks and lay Buddhists interviewed to find the image of social interaction that exists in the virtual community,such as QQ or Wechat group.The survey is designed on the framework of Social Interaction Theory which studies the social interaction from three aspects: Community Structure and Function,Community Interactive Relations and Social Interactive Field.The survey reckons that there are different attitudes toward the using of virtual community exit between monks and laities.The virtual community often forms a three-tier social structure of "group owner-group management-common group members",and has further differentiation in the third tier.There are three reasons why group members choose to join the virtual community: group chat can make individuals get religious identity recognition,group chat itself is an efficient communication tool,and group chat can meet people's daily social needs.In group chat,there are interaction relationships among members,such as mutual assistance,cooperation and conflict.These interactions are fragile and depend on the strength of group members' identity consciousness,which ends with group members' active or passive withdrawal from group chat.The social interaction of virtual community mainly takes place in group chat.The public and private relations of group chat are highly correlated with the activity of group chat.These social relations can also extend offline and form a mechanism of complementary online and offline interaction to promote the overall development of virtual community.The way of information dissemination in the virtual religious communities is of the following characters: The identity of subject is vague;the extremely low cost of creating a community and participating in it;Real-time,wide-ranging audience;a netlike mode of information dissemination;the linearization of religious activities.Social interaction in virtual religious communities shows completely different characteristics from the previous one-way information dissemination through websites,which provides a sample for understanding the current religious activities on the Internet,and also provides some suggestions for the formulation of regulations on religious Internet management,such as defining the subject of responsibility and elaborating the regulations on religious Internet management.At the end of the paper,the shortcomings of this study and the ideas for improvement are discussed.