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.
The article analyses how historical memory is being formed in the modern digital realm. The authors show the emergence of a new form of historical memory, characteristic of the digital era, which we call "media memory". Using the methodology historical epistemology, media philosophy and memory studies, the authors demonstrate the change in production and replication of knowledge about the past due to the spread of digital media. The distinctive features of "media memory" are: massive non-professional production of historical content, democratic character, speed, subjectivity and emotional intensity. These features are associated with the combination of prosuming and crowdsourcing, which increase the activity of history lovers and non-professional volunteers in social media. Considering the largest historical digital projects, which have brought together the efforts of millions of history lovers, the article comes to the conclusion that academic historians are losing the monopoly on the production of historical knowledge, while the latter is being turned into digital form, with the widespread participation of ordinary people in the production of such content.
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