The Production of Salafi Spaces in Computer-mediated Environments: A Social Theory Perspective on ‘Digital Religion’

Abstract

The concept or notion of ‘digital religion’ has gained traction in recent years in the study of the intersection of media and religion. In this paper, I argue that this concept tends to reify ‘religion’ as a unique, sui generis phenomenon, disregarding decades-long debates about the idea of ‘religion’ in the study of religion. After deconstructing the notion of ‘digital religion’, as put forward in an essay by Stewart Hoover and Nabil Echchaibi (2014), I propose a social theory perspective of (digital) space, drawing mainly from the sociology of space and taking into account affordances and the citational nature of signifying practices. In the final section, I apply this approach to data I gathered during fieldwork online and offline among Salafi Muslims in the Netherlands and Germany from 2008 until 2015; this will showcase the potential not only for abstaining from ‘religionizing’ social phenomena but also of a social theory approach to the production of digital spaces.