Holy Selfie as the Channel of Media Memory in the Digital World

Abstract

Selfie as a special genre of digital photography performs a variety of functions, giving users the possibility to refer themselves to places, persons and events, thus personifying one's self-presentation and expressing the author's attitude to the world and their own experiences. Selfie is actively used in the representation of religious life, first of all, documenting the connection of the authors to sacred places, objects, persons and events, preserving the memory of significant moments in the life of an individual and making it available to the public. The memorial function of photography in the holy selfie format merges with its communicative function, changing the motivation of religious practice, redirecting it from the acquisition of religious experience to its sharing, empathy and participation, i.e. socializing religious experience. By analysing likes and reposts of selfie content, one can create strategies for the union of virtual religious communities around the offline experience of their members. In this article we will try to identify the differences in the ways of organizing the semantic space of holy selfie, practiced by the followers of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Holy selfie will be studied as a new media memory channel to which users resort in order to correlate the practices of constructing personal and group memory for the reproduction of religious context by banal religion. Our work is based on the content analysis of selfie photos posted on Instagram.