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사이버 문화와 종교 : 전자 종교공동체 사례를 중심으로 A Case Study of Electronic Religious Communities
유명기,성시정 한국문화인류학회 2000 韓國文化人類學 Vol.33 No.1
Cyberspace represents a revolutionary advance in our means of interactive sociality. With little interference from the barriers of time and space, it leads to the opening of a new field, called cyberculture. The ubiquitous nature of cyberculture has firmly manifested itself in computer-mediated communication(CMC). Recently the field of CMC has been expanding, and the number of participants has been on a rapid increase. The development of communication technology transforms a society by changing the ways of communicating and establishing relationships with one another. An electronic religious community is one of the outcomes from this transformation. Unlike an off-line religious community, a virtual religious community has no geographic or ethnic foundations. Instead, it emerges from repeated interactions through CMC, and is constructed by believers' collective and collaborating imagination and symbolization. The purpose of this study is to examine how electronic religious community emerges and is maintained, and what its characteristics are. This study aims to explore the differences between a virtual religious community and an off-line religious community, and the ways in which the development of communication technology influences the realm of religion. The findings from this study are as follows. Firstly, an eletronic religious community begins with the formation of a group of people who have the same belief on computer network. Once starting a service, the on-line religious community must secure critical mass by continuously recruiting its members. The faithful organize their time and space, and share the same sense of time and of place. They structure their religious performances in stable forms through cyber liturgies, cyber sermons, electronic bulletin boards, electronic chatting, on-line meetings, etc. Secondly, believers construct new relationships in the virtual religious community. CMC provides believers with a new opportunity to exchange information, cultivate mutual friendship, and intensify religious experiences. They cooperate to produce information and knowledge as religious goods. They destroy conventional social boundaries by holding communion with people who have various social backgrounds, and develop strong emotional ties with each other, sharing a sense of We-group. Social relationships in the on-line religious community appear to be based on equality among believers, but in reality there are imbedded informal hierarchies in them. Finally, in spite of the anonymous nature of CMC, the faithful of the on-line religious community maintain their identities stable. They find shared identity with other believers in the virtual religious community, and make it as a part of their own identity. The collective identity found in the on-line religious community is not based on exclusiveness from the external world, but on the strong ties among participants. It seems that the on-line religious community is now developing many characteristics similar to those of an off-line religious community. The virtual religious community, like the off-line one, shows intimate personal relationships, deep emotional sentiments, mutual cooperation and strong ties among its members. There are some differences in terms of the goals which each electronic religious communities have, and the ways in which believers interact with one another. Yet, the electronic religious community where the faithful participate and interact actively, shows a possibility to grow into a community which provides its members with shared symbols, experiences, meanings, rituals, identity and sense of belongings. Electronic religious communities might be 'real' communities or 'pseudo' communities. Or they might be something entirely new in the realm of social contacts. What becomes clear is that the formation of on-line religious communities is in part a response to the people's longing for a new community, which can replace traditional communities that have been rapidly disintegrated around the world.