REDiCON: Religion – Digitality – Confessionality

YouTube成立于2005年，现已成为互联网上主要的信息，教育，娱乐和文化平台之一。它将移动图像扩展为社会嵌入式视频文化。作为一个社交网络，该网站的用户还就宗教和相关主题进行互动。用户在宗教问题上定位自己，并阐明他们的宗教自我形象;他们将自己分配到宗教社区，并在它们之间划定界限;他们用宗教术语解释现实，并对他人的观点和行为做出判断，标记规范性和描述性的有效性主张。无论是日益增长的原教旨主义宗教性和多样性，以及异质性的方法，宗教能见度在线发生在YouTube上的公众视野，但几乎没有注意到的研究。为了探索YouTube上的这些宗教传播形式，REDiCON项目采取了一种创新方法：借鉴忏悔的概念，将YouTube上的宗教传播作为忏悔实践进行分析。考虑到特定平台的启示，与基督教YouTube用户及其观众制作和接收视频相关的做法将从神学和宗教研究的角度进行审查和解释。忏悔的做法被理解为一种晚期现代忏悔文化的表达，并在数字媒体的背景下被阐述为一种宗教忏悔理论。我们认为，YouTube上的忏悔做法是新兴的，超越了现有的宗教忏悔做法的文化剧目，并与它们结合，适应它们，从而进一步发展它们。这个项目的目的是详细阐述这些做，塑造和取消忏悔的动力。REDiCON从三个层面分析了YouTube上的忏悔做法，三个次级项目从一开始就密切合作：（a）制作，（B）工作/内容，（c）接受。通过探索这三个层面上的忏悔实践，该项目不仅有望对YouTube上的宗教实践有启发性的见解，从而在一个迄今为止几乎没有在神学术语中探索的领域。它也有助于理解后期现代宗教言论文化和数字通信条件下的宗教忏悔实践。因此，该项目以一种新的方式提出了“忏悔”的经典问题，我们希望它能为神学和宗教研究提供重要的新方向和创新的刺激，研究忏悔，宗教和数字媒体。

Founded in 2005, YouTube has become one of the major informational, educational, entertainment, and cultural platforms on the internet. It has expanded the moving image into a socially embedded video culture. In the site’s capacity as a social network, its users also interact on religious and related topics. Users position themselves on religious questions and articulate their religious self-image; they assign themselves to religious communities and draw boundaries between them; they interpret reality in religious terms and make judgments on the views and actions of others, marking normative and descriptive validity claims. Both growing fundamentalist religiousness and diversity as well as heterogenous approaches to religious visibility online happen on YouTube in public view, but almost unnoticed by research. In order to explore these forms of religious communication on YouTube, the REDiCON project takes an innovative approach: Drawing on the concept of confessionality, religious communication on YouTube is analyzed as a confessional practice. Allowing for platform-specific affordances, the practices associated with the production and reception of videos on the part of Christian YouTube users and their audiences will be examined and interpreted theologically as well as from a religious studies perspective. Practices of confessionality are understood as an expression of a late modern culture of confession and elaborated into a theory of religious confession in the context of digital media. We assume that practices of confessionality on YouTube are newly emerging and transcending existing cultural repertoires of religious confessional practices as well as tying in with them, adapting them and thereby developing them further. It is the aim of the project to elaborate these dynamics of doing, shaping, and undoing confessionality in detail. REDiCON examines confessional practices on YouTube on three levels of analysis which are addressed by three sub-projects working closely together from the outset: (a) production, (b) work / content, (c) reception. By exploring confessional practices on these three levels, the project promises not only instructive insights into religious practices on YouTube and thus in a field that has hardly been explored in theological terms so far. It also contributes to an understanding of late modern religious speech culture and religious practices of confession under the conditions of digital communication. The project thus poses the classic question of “the confessional” in a new way, and we expect it to provide important new directions and innovative stimuli for theological and religious studies research on confessionality, religion, and digital media.