ABSTRACT
A scholarship on media and religion is emerging around the notion that the natures of both ‘religion’ and ‘the media’ are undergoing change and are, in fact, converging in important ways. Religion in the industrialized West is becoming increasingly an individual matter. While both religion online and online religion provide the audience with resources for meaning-making, they are differentiated by the audience’s intentions, motivations and products involved in the meaning-construction process. A basic assumption of this new religion research is the powerful idea, itself derived from the work of social theorists such as Giddens, that the contemporary religious project is – like the contemporary social project – a project of the construction of the self and identity. For informants for whom ‘seeking’ has become dominant, sources such as the Internet/web seem somehow logical contexts for working out religious/spiritual identity. In neither case could it be said that the digital context is somehow determinative of practice.
