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Islamic Practices in New Media
A great deal of scholarly attention has been given to the role of the Internet in enabling new forms of association, interaction, and debate, in changing both economies of knowledge and the possibilities and conditions of collective action. Following these lines of inquiry, scholars of the Middle East have explored the use of the Internet as a vehicle for religious and political mobilization, including as a tool of militant recruitment by jihadist groups.1 Another body of literature has focused on how mediatization in general and the Internet in particular have reshaped the sociology of Islamic knowledge, including the norms and institutions of religious authority.2 While these issues are extremely important, in this paper I want to explore another key dimension of the Internet, one not easily examined through the sort of analytical lens that has generally governed the study of religion and politics online. My analysis takes as its starting point less a particular content than a style of online navigation, one strongly indebted to and encouraged by the technological architecture of the medium itself.3 I will characterize this style as follows: to enter the Internet can mean that one embarks on an adventure, that one sets off across a quixotic, unpredictable landscape whose every twist and turn presents not the threads of an unfolding discourse or the development of a deeper understanding but the sudden surprise of an affect, the pleasure or shock of an unexpected discovery. To be online can bring a sense of vertiginous mobility, an urge to jump again and again, shifts too quick for the unfolding of an argument but enough to allow for the triggering of a fleeting sensation or psychic charge--a burst of excitement, terror, fear, silliness, sadness, sentimentality, amazement, and so on. Notably, the common expression used to describe the act of using the Internet--"web surfing"--points to this phenomenological feature of the medium's architecture (it is not web cycling, or web crawling, or web fishing--riding waves is exhilarating and unpredictable). This solicitation to set off toward what might amaze, or horrify, or enchant is particularly pronounced on sites like YouTube, where much of the content is composed of short fragments extracted from...