The present study has two aims. Firstly, it investigates whether religious organizations in the Stockholm area have adapted and designed activities for different target groups. Secondly, it explores the means by which such activities are marketed. The data used to carry out the study consists of information obtained from the organizations’ own websites, i.e., their descriptions of their activities and of their organization. The study draws upon Hjarvard’s mediatization theory and Campbell’s theory of online and offline religion. Both theories deal with religion and media. Hjarvard’s theory focuses on society at large and how religious actors have had to adapt themselves and their content to fit the times. Campbell’s theory serves as a valuable addition to Hjarvard’s approach by arguing that religion online functions as a complement to religion offline, i.e, outside the context of the Internet and other media. The method used to gather and analyze the data is content analysis, i.e., the systematic coding of themes identified in the sources. The coding scheme developed here includes such categories as target groups, language usage, marketing, and the site where activities take place. The results indicate that there are distinct differences in the way organizations design activities for specific target groups. For instance, some organizations devote a significant amount of online information to activities for children, while others do not mention such activities at all on their websites. Some organizations stress helping people in need as a core purpose, while others emphasize their engagement in providing activities for young people. Two out of five organizations had some form of activity that take place via the Internet. Marketing strategies deployed to “sell” their activities also vary, for instance by their ways of using language or by citing statistics in their argumentation. The answers to the questions asked at the outset of this study show that the empirical cases investigated support Hjarvard’s and Campbell’s theories, since there is a correlation between on the one hand the way in which organizations use the Internet to communicate and how they adapt, and on the other how religion online and offline interact.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-98418 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Fransson, Emilia |
| Publisher | Karlstads universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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