At the peak of development of the web 3.0., the position of users has shifted, since they are demanding more space for their own expression. Users have become 'prosumers'; they do not only want to consume endless amounts of information coming from different organizations, but to actively participate in content creation as well. That brings some challenges to profit and non-profit organizations. One of the latter are also religious communities, which are confronting the emerging challenge of the two-way communication – establishing authority in the midst of the symmetry and creating meaning behind the used technology. Between the different Christian denominations around the world, there are already many differences and opinions regarding online activity. Such dilemmas, have leaded us to re-question and research questions such as: how some Slovenian Christian Communities are dealing with the process of digitalization, what kind of communication models are being used, what are the goals of their communications with publics and what kind of similarities and differences are emerging between researched denominations. While using mixed method of content analysis, we have analyzed the posts and tools used on the Internet and Facebook pages and compared them between denominations. We have noticed, that the two-way communication - neither on the Internet and Facebook pages nor within the used web tools, the full potential is not being used, which is consistent with the findings, that many religious organizations use new media in the same way they have used previous ones. Researched Slovene Christian communities are similar in the way of unexploited potential of interactive tools of the websites and social media. Online activity is more than just a delivery and accumulation of information. The two-way communication brings loyalty and identification, which are often goals not only of ‘worldly’ brands, but of religious - Christian ones as well.
|
