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。它将动态图像扩展为一种社会嵌入的视频文化。作为一个社交网站，它的用户还可以就宗教和相关话题进行互动。用户定位自己的宗教问题，并阐明他们的宗教自我形象；他们把自己归入宗教团体，并在宗教团体之间划清界限；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，标志着规范性和描述性的有效性主张。日益增长的原教旨主义宗教性和多样性，以及在线宗教知名度的异质方法，都发生在YouTube上的公众视野中，但几乎没有被研究注意到。为了探索YouTube上宗教传播的这些形式，REDiCON项目采用了一种创新的方法：借鉴忏悔的概念，将YouTube上的宗教传播作为一种忏悔的实践来分析。考虑到平台特定的启示，与基督教YouTube用户及其观众的视频制作和接收相关的实践将从神学和宗教研究的角度进行检查和解释。忏悔的实践被理解为一种晚期现代忏悔文化的表达，并在数字媒体背景下被阐述为一种宗教忏悔理论。我们认为YouTube上的忏悔实践是新兴的，超越了现有的宗教忏悔实践的文化曲目，并与它们联系在一起，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、塑造和撤销忏悔的动态。REDiCON对YouTube上的忏悔实践进行了三个层面的分析，这些分析由三个从一开始就密切合作的子项目来解决：(a)制作，(b)工作/内容，(c)接收。通过在这三个层面上探索忏悔实践，该项目不仅承诺对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过的领域。它还有助于理解现代晚期的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在忏悔、宗教和数字媒体方面提供重要的新方向和创新刺激。

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.