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The first three editions of this bestselling book have established A Social History of the Media as a classic, providing a masterful overview of communication media and of the social and cultural contexts within which they emerged and evolved over time. This fourth edition has been revised and updated throughout to reflect the latest developments…
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Artificial intelligence is changing how we interact with everything: food, healthcare, travel – and also religion. Experts say major global faiths are discussing their relationship with AI, and some are starting to incorporate this technology into their worship. Robot priests can recite prayers, perform funerals, and even comfort those experiencing a spiritual crisis. Is it…
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This book explores how social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp ‘accidentally’ enable and nurture the creation of digital afterlives, and, importantly, the effect this digital inheritance has on the bereaved. Debra J. Bassett offers a holistic exploration of this phenomenon and presents qualitative data from three groups of participants: service providers, digital…
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Wellness has become synonymous with yoga, meditation, and other forms of self-care. Over the past 60 years, what began as an alternative to mainstream medicine has coalesced with consumer culture and has been commercialised to such an extent that the term is now synonymous with an industry of exclusive products and services. This book traces…
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Japanese Religions on the Internet draws attention to how religion is being presented, represented and discussed on the Japanese Internet. Its intention is to contribute to wider discussions about religion and the Internet by providing an important example – based on one of the Internet’s most prominent languages – of how new media technologies are…
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Those who have followed the development of online new religiosity over the past decade will not have failed to notice that conspiracy theories and ‘New Age’ ideas are thriving together. But how new and how surprising is the phenomenon of ‘conspirituality’? In the present article, we challenge the thesis put forward by Charlotte Ward and…
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Islamophobia, the idea that Islam is an insurmountable cultural threat to Christianity and “the West,” is widely circulated online. Right-wing populists, affectively perform their identities and Islamophobic worldviews in ways that trigger fear, rage, and a range of other emotions in both themselves and sets of significant others. Here I examine typical online Islamophobic metanarratives,…
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Interaction with digital technologies expands the experience and reach of religious communities and their social networks across vast territorial space, generating new symbols and signifiers, and constituting new social networks. As the internet facilitates the swift spread of religious enthusiasms, knowledges and forms of practice across boundaries of nations, cultures and classes, it has also…
