Lunch Lecture - Martin Slama: Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Religious Uses of Social Media in Indonesia

The presentation is based on online and offline research carried out for a new project entitled “Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia” (project start: June 2014). The project views the internet as a collection of interfaces among which social networking sites feature prominently, and attempts to link Islamic everyday piousness and regular religious gatherings (e.g. majelis taklim) to social media usage (such as Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp). These interfaces, as the name of the most popular site, i.e. Facebook, suggests, provide ample opportunities to exhibit visual and textual material, especially people’s religious expressions. In the Indonesian context in particular, social networking interfaces have become sites where the country’s many “Islamic faces” are displayed – and it is these emerging forms of conveying and expressing Islam as well as the socialities that are generated in these intersecting online/offline realms the paper attempts to discuss. In other words, the paper aims at mapping out research potentials for a study of Islam that is conscious of the dis/junctures of virtual and actual realms in the construction of Islamic practice and authority. For more information on the project, especially the visual material that has been generated so far, please see: https://www.facebook.com/IslamicInterFaces

Programme FRIAS Lunch Lectures, Summer Term 2015