This panel explores how practices of the self have been shaped by digital hyperconnectivity, how networks provide sites for the negotiation of community, and how various forms of digital media serve as sites for the articulation of religious humor, anxiety, and protest. How do non-institutionalized media consumers engage in shaping the content and culture of their media, and conversely, how do social and technological infrastructures reflect and seek to transform self and community? The first two papers explore the structured and perhaps over-determined nature of the technological intimacies and technologies of enchantment that seemingly complicate neoliberal notions of sovereignty and networked conceptions of sociality. The second two papers engage with forms of digital apocalypse, both as reflected in religious anxieties that seek to deconstruct digital worlds and imagine traditional offline futures, and as reflected in creative online performances of irreverent religious protest and humor around the demise of digital worlds.
This presentation analyzes discourses on veiling among Catholic women online as an example of new ways in which practices of the self have been shaped by digital hyperconnectivity. While on the surface, the veil is meant to hearken back to eras past – to combat modernity with tradition – the social media posts about veiling reveal how ideas of tradition are mobilized to negotiate a key tension surrounding self-making in late modernity: the reflexive, neoliberal sovereign self versus an emerging post-neoliberal self, determined through algorithmic individuation. Focusing on discourses of (1) choice and empowerment and (2) trust in the algorithm in #veiling posts on TikTok and Twitter, I argue that interpreting artificial intelligence through a theistic lens helps people articulate, understand, and legitimate the emerging shift from a self-reflexive individual practice to an algorithmically driven process.
African culture has been largely described as communitarian, and digital media widely accused of threatening that structure. Within scholarship, there are new attempts to understand how the disruption occurs and what new structures might be emerging. Some suggest utter destruction and displacement by Western individualism. Others diagnose or prescribe a return to communitarian models like Ubuntu. Still others suggest a new sociality undergirded by the “network.” Using multimodal discourse analysis of three instances of online Christian meme-type content, I show that digital religion, as practiced online, resists such easy categorizations and extensions. Digital religion scholarship should pay attention to the lived online religious expressions of digitally active Christians for answers, as these non-institutional actors may hold part of the solution to what new cultures are emerging today. And that answer, I suggest, may be that the inability to neatly circumscribe modes of being may be nothing new after all.
Through a multi-media presentation that draws on digital ethnographic research and discourse analysis of podcasts, video streams, and social media, we highlight the relationship between digital apocalypticism and traditionalists’ hopes for an analogue future. By digital apocalypticism, we are referring to the religious anxieties that Reactive Orthodox have about AI, digital surveillance, and transhumanism, and their use of the digital to connect, network, and craft an analogue future offline at the end of the digital world. Digital apocalypticism is linked to the ideological techne of futurecraft. Drawing on the work of architectural theorists Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel, we extend their concept of futurecraft to think beyond the built design of cities to digital media worlds, often the preferred gathering spaces of far/alt-right ideologues. In doing so, we demonstrate that the philosophies moving online are aimed at digital deconstruction to build tangible futures offline, what we call trad futurisms.
Scholars of religion have noted the ways religious and political ideas interact and circulate within memetic communication (Campbell, 2018). There is little research on how African American religious humor, virtual death rituals, and mourning memes have provided a site for the contestation and negotiation of a digital apocalypse. Although #RIPBlackTwitter and #twitterhomegoingservice do not register as an explicit sociopolitical critique, they indict Elon Musk’s geeky hypermasculine takeover of Twitter by simultaneously ‘celebrating’ Twitter’s homegoing and attending Black Twitter's own living wake one week after Musk’s arrival at Twitter’s headquarters. I argue that the hashtags should be seen as representative of creative online performances of irreverent religious protest and that mourning memes in this case are signifying displays of U.S. Afro-Protestants' repertoire of humor on irreverent religious participation.