
Anne Lundahl Mauritsen, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aarhus University
As the summer vacations come to an end in Denmark, we can reflect upon the current work the Danish Recovira team is undertaking. In the last blogpost, we investigated the importance of the senses in relation to how members of religious groups conceptualized the feeling of community. We highlighted how digital tools clearly had limitations in the construction of ‘authentic’ community for our informants. Nevertheless, there are ways in which the communities employ digital tools, and we will present these in this blogpost.
It is clear from our data that all religious groups do in fact have digital presences across various media such as Facebook, Instagram and websites. The ideational dimension of the homepages show that community building is indeed important for the groups as shown through advertising their offline activities. Members can get knowledge of others in the community, they can communicate with each other, the community as such can communicate to its members, and it can share values and history on the digital platforms. There is, however, one particularly important function that social media fulfill: the communication of events in the religious groups or the eventification in these groups. Eventification (sometimes used interchangeably with festivalization) encompasses the “social phenomenon that seems to compensate for the lack of physical contact in modern life and cyberspace, but also the lack of meaning in an overly material world. Humans like (and need) to be together, to touch, hug, celebrate, experience, feel happy. Intentional communities, free cultural spaces, parties, and festivals make us feel connected, tolerant, and inclined to share” (Sala 2021). While meeting in the digital sphere thus seemed less meaningful to an overwhelmingly big proportion of our informants, the online meditation of physical events taking place in the various groups was an essential feature of social media and should not be underestimated. We are told in interviews that informants routinely check the websites and Facebook pages of their respective communities, and that this eases accessibility as well as entrance to the groups. We explore this theme in a forthcoming article and promise to return to this point.
image credit: Photo by Nitin Dhumal: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-lens-sunglasses-on-sand-near-sea-at-sunset-selective-focus-photography-46710/