Buddhist online communities on Vkontakte social network: structure, practices and ideas

Abstract

Today, social networks have become a space for the active development of Buddhist online communities. In the new digital environment, new social forms of interaction between users are emerging, often with different ideas about Buddhism. Moreover, many of them are not integrated into offline Buddhist communities and practices. This process can be considered as the development of a digital religion, admixture of online and offline social structures, practices and ideas. The paper is aimed at identifying the characteristics of the structure of Buddhist communities on the VKontakte social network. We have used automated data collection and mathematical modelling methods to study the interaction between the existing online communities, identified and described the clusters of Buddhist users.