Over the last two decades, research concerning religion and the media, religion and the Internet has been revived and repositioned within communication and media research. This is especially true in post soviet Central and Eastern European countries (Khroul 2013, Kołodziejska 2014, Rončáková 2017, Tudor & Bratosin, 2018. This article provides a summary of the international and Hungarian-related research history of the area, highlighting the turning points that originate from the change of the media technology, the media history or followed the rearrangement of general media research. For the first point, mentioning the initial radio, cinema, and television research, and then the current examination of the Internet. For the second point, the acceptance media studies replacing the early media effect researches, the so-called cultural or interpretative turn in media studies and the uses and gratifications approach starting in the 1970s are classified. Following this, the aim of the article is to present and compare the different religious media research typologies and finally, the descriptive presentation of contemporary research directions in international and Hungarian science. The study mentions not only theoretical, but research methodological possibilities as well.
The present study shows how Hungarian churches and religious communities responded to the physical closure and relocation to online spaces in the spring of 2020, since while physical gates became closed, digital gates became opened. In the churches, work began in two directions with particular intensity. On the one hand, they organized their online appearance. On the other hand, they began to rethink their theological reflections on the possibilities of digital technology. The study also analyses both the event- and community-based presence of the churches as well as what they broadcast to their believers. The intention was to find the answer to what the presence of the camera meant in the process of live broadcasting, with a special focus on the visual elements and procedures that differed from the visual perception of real presence during streaming: the camera movement, the different viewing angles, the location of the cameras, the cut, and the sound quality. In other words, the believers had a new visual experience, an optical representation of reality, which afforded them a new type of interactivity and participation. In addition, the study highlights the generational differences that can be explored in digital transitions.
The research on the relationship between religion and the media has expanded in the past decades with many new directions, one of which is the examination of the creators of religious media content—more precisely, the exploration of their different role perceptions, commitment, motivations, and goals. Religious content creators are those media producers whose content appears on various media surfaces (printed press, radio, television, film, digital media), regardless of whether they perform their activities as employees of a media company or voluntarily. This study presents the research we conducted among Hungarian religious content creators between 2019 and 2020. The purpose of the study is to develop a well-founded role typology based on the defining features and modes of operation of different role types.
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