ABSTRACT
The chapter presents an exploratory study of religion-centered gaming pages on social networks. Šlerka and Šisler introduce a new quantitative method (called Normalized Social Distance) that calculates the distances between various social groups. These distances are based on the intentional stances expressed by the activities of the groups’ members on social networks. Normalized social distance provides an opportunity for distant reading of social media, enabling us to formally represent and analyze the structural aspects of big social data. The case study presented in this chapter explores 15 religion-centered gaming pages on Facebook and analyzes publicly available data about 10,275 users of these pages via normalized social distance. The results indicate that there exist several tightly connected clusters of religion-centered gaming pages on Facebook, whose audiences are significantly “close” to each other and share similar intentional stances. The method detailed in this chapter could be relatively easily adopted by other researchers in different contexts.
