Interdisciplinary Research on the Contemporary Spirituality Culture : from the Viewpoint of Network Formation via the Web Community

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When looking at the mass of information accumulated so far on the subject of "spirituality" and at academic definitions of it, it is evident that the meaning of "spirituality" has been difficult to grasp. The objective of this research was to analyze information that we collected about this subject mainly through the web community and to present the results within an academic framework both in theoretical and in practical terms. More concretely, we launched and managed the portal website'spiritual navigator' (abbr.Spinavi) and the blog 'My Spinavi'.In this research we used several methods to analyze the feedback comments and the rest of the information exchanged online : we undertook a factor analysis of the spiritual psychological test conducted on the online posters and a multiple regression analysis between the number of posts in the forum that we created and the number of posts on blogs used by individuals who have an interest in the "spiritual" ; finally, we also analyzed the relationships born out of posting comments and trackbacking blog posts. The results of our analysis confirmed the existence of a tendency that should be termed a "spiritual crisis" : while an independent spirituality could be observed among the online posters of Spinavi, this spirituality, which is sustained through their exchanges, does not tend to withstand time. In addition and despite of our observation of a cooperation between online posters, a fact that could be seen as the formation of 'a community of support', it became clear that such a cooperation stops at the level of a superficial and 'weak' spirituality. Several practical themes were examined in this research project, such as the possibility of forming dialogues through the agency of 'spirituality' and the question of how enthusiasts and believers of spirituality are related.