Media, Technology, and New Religious Movements
Since the first edition of theOxford Handbook of New Religious Movements(2004), the growing field of media, religion, and culture has moved at a rapid clip. The previous emphases on theoretical approaches that imagined a significant distinction between online and offline practices has been largely replaced by approaches that attend to the entanglement of digital and physical worlds. Research within this new analytical turn speaks about the Internet and religion in terms of third spaces, distributed materialities or subjectivies, and co-constitutive histories and locations. Highlighted within these works are the negotiations and intersections of consumer practices, popular culture, information control and religious pluralism online. As the field continues to develop, theoretical approaches that emphasize entanglement will help disclose the various relationships of power by which the material practices of religion, media, and technology are produced - allowing scholars to trace robust histories of multiplicity by which the contemporary imaginaries of religion, media, and technology are inherited.