The Reactions to Muslim Identity Building through Social Media: User Comments on YouTube Street Interview Videos

Creative Commons License

Abanoz E.

RELIGIONS, cilt.13, sa.6, 2022 (AHCI) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 13 Sayı: 6
  • Basım Tarihi: 2022
  • Doi Numarası: 10.3390/rel13060498
  • Dergi Adı: RELIGIONS
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, ATLA Religion Database, Index Islamicus, Linguistic Bibliography, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: social identity, Muslim, YouTube, street interviews, Turkey, SELF, IDENTIFICATION, CATEGORIZATION, SECULARISM, ONLINE, UK
  • Ondokuz Mayıs Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

With the expanding digital public sphere, social media have worked as tools that construct and maintain the boundaries and descriptors of social identity among members, by portraying and reinforcing content shared by communities and cultures. Religious leaders and groups have used social media to make themselves more visible and to communicate their faith's mission. The scope of this study is to use Henri Tajfel's social identity theory to examine the viewers' comments on the content created by a religious individual/group for the production, shaping, and reproduction of the Muslim identity through YouTube. We have used Corpus Linguistics (CL) methods to examine relative frequencies and emerging statistical significance of lexical patterns in viewers' comments. This analysis shows that a strong "we" versus "you" dichotomization exists between the in-group, Muslims, and the out-group, persons who are systematically degraded as being low-informed religious, or non-religious, in street interviews.