In order to predict what the encounter between a religious community and new media looks like, one must look at that religious community’s historical relationship to both religious authority and the interpretation of sacred text. In a text-centric religion like Judaism, it may seem that there is little room for updating on sacred scrolls that are ritualistically copied, stored and disposed of under well-delineated codes of Halakha (the code of Jewish law). One would assume, given their unchanging relationship to Torah and Talmud, that observant, Orthodox Jewish communities would not seek to embrace new media. However, other parallel traditions within Judaism, such as the interactive oral tradition of scholarly interpretation of Torah ultimately recorded in the Mishah, Talmud and Midrash, which creates the precedent for experimental engagement with religious text and sets the stage for the reinterpretation of textual authority within the context of new media. For this reason, Judaism tolerates a large amount of dialogic engagement in order to attain textual meaning of the central religious texts of Judaism. The non-centralized character of Jewish religious authority, too, is another factor enabling Jewish religious communities to be open to differences in interpretation of Jewish practice. Scholars have focused on these two factors of Judaism, a parallel oral tradition and the decentralized religious authority, as being important reasons for a Jewish embrace of new media, even among the Orthodox, who, for the most part, self-identify as “not modern” (with the notable exceptions of the Modern Orthodox and Lubavitch Hassidism). A few, very socially isolated groups among the Orthodox (e.g., Satmar) have engaged in limits, such as Internet filters, or outright bans of this most modern of media. “The Internet has become a space populated by users who have readily brought their faith online with them,” Heidi Campbell writes in the introduction to her book, When Religion Meets New Media (2010) and Jews are no exception.
The idea that religious communities utilize the Internet in a less-involved way than their secular counterparts is also incorrect. In many cases, the opposite is true: religious communities are heavy participants in the complex network of digital cultures. In his study of Middle Eastern groups and their use of the Internet, Jon W. Anderson (New Media in the Muslim World, 2003) noted that the “Westernized” youths participated in the Internet in a similar way as their counterparts in the United States: chatting, use of social media, and shopping. At the same time, the most conservative of groups, the young religious scholars used the Internet for research and participation in Koranic interpretation and thereby utilized hyperlinks for previous commentary, user annotation and inter-textual references. While their use of the media was tied to the traditional practice of Koranic scholarship, the religiously conservative users’ depth of participation in the mediating nature of the Internet created a much deeper, mediated experience on the Internet. This experience transformed the practice of the traditional Koranic scholarship into a more mediated one where the participants’ subjectivity was transformed by the mediated nature of the text. Those conservative, religious users in the Middle East Anderson observed engaged in Internet participation that produced a mediated culture through work that extended beyond the self (and notions of private domain) and became part of a truly intertwined digital community.
Saskia Sassen pointed to these sub-national communities (such as the Muslim and Jewish religious communities) as overlooked players we must now consider when we talk about globalization and digital communities (A Sociology of Globalization (2007)). Traditional religious users are not digital participants one readily identifies with hyper-mobility or elite internationalism, two standard concepts associated with globalization. Yet, even among the most traditional, religious citizens of a now digital world, the processes of globalization (such as mediation, intersubjectivity) march on, far removed from any debates over nation, community of nations, or global hegemonies.