What is Administrator

This chapter examines interaction-oriented virtual religious communities online in the light of sociological theory of religious communities. The authors find that the particular importance of identity, authenticity and authority in religious communities populating online discussion forums may give rise to special problems online, which are demonstrated here to be direct outcomes of the necessary reliance on information technology to carry out functions of online religious social groups which are intended to correspond to offline religious categories. The authors draw upon both sociological theory of religious communities and information systems theory of computer-mediated communications to identify salient points of similarity and difference between online and offline religious social structures, and conclude that online religious forum communities as presently constituted are unlikely to be able to directly replicate the traditional social structures of the offline religious institutions from which they originated, due to the particular powers and constraints on action embodied in social software.