Online Religious Practice As The Practice Of Everyday Life

The study focuses on Buddhists of virtual communities in social media.By participant observation of a fibetan Buddhism virtual community and semi-structured interviews of 17 online religious practitioners,it investigates how online religious practice has been embedded in their everyday lives and how it has interacted with social and cultural structures.It follows the theories of everyday life,especially Michel de Certeau's the practice of everyday life and Roger Silverstone's domestication theory.The study analyzes how online religious practice constructs or maintains the rhythms of everyday life of time,space and multiple identities,under the perspective of domestication theory that includes stages of appropriation,objectification,incorporation and conversion.People frequently switch between multiple online communities based on their own feelings.Their media tacties as assorted cold dishes reflects inherent characteristics of new media technology as well as secularization of contemporary religion.They construct a hybrid and intermittent spiritual space,breaking through a series of traditional dualistic framework such as private and public,secular and spiritual,virtual and real.The rhythms of online religious practice is a mixture of physiological time and social time,family time and work time,the Gregorian calendar and the Tibetan calendar,reproducing and further consolidating the hierarchy of social time.Some Buddhists who often participate in online activities choose to avoid belief issues in other public places.For them,new media technology is an expedient that helps them integrate multiple social roles.In the study,four forms of online activities of Tibetan Buddhism that can be regarded as extensions of traditional religious behaviors are deeply described.The new technology also deconstructs the relationship between time and space and that between group and individual to a certain degree,giving these online activities significant characteristics of virtual community.Online religious practice creates a new spiritual culture which is called a kind of media realism.The new spiritual culture is the representation of social,cultural and technological structures such as the popularization of new media,modernity anxiety and Tibetan utopia culture.It has also reconstructed current social and cultural structures and become an organic part of them.As a representation of people's practice of everyday life in New Media Era,online religious practice has dual attributes of constraint and creativity.The study shows multiply embedded relation between online religious practice and everyday life.The embeddedness mode,which reflects the interaction of macro structure and individual initiative,is social,cultural and technical as well as individual,situational and self-reflective.Buddhists facing multiple social relations,cultural norms,technical conditions,life stories and role obligations,are seeking or constructing media consumption tactics and religious practice rhythms for their own life orders.This study focuses on dual attributes of constraint and creativity in the practice of everyday life.This theory and its application in media culture studies tend to pay more attention to "consumption as a production" and the creativity of consumption,which sometimes leads to a disregard for domination of macrostructures.The study suggests that we return to Michel de Certeau's dual logic thinking to discuss the new media technology.