Monika Tosik

Beyond time: space, and community boundaries: the new affordances of digital prayer walls

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Exploring the emerging, technology-enabled ways of expanding traditional religious practices, the paper focuses on digital prayer walls as a new medium for spiritual interaction. Building on Campbell’s (2012, 2017) digital religion framework and the Media Proximization Approach (Kopytowska 2018, 2022) it argues that technological affordances of the cyberspace along with the performative potential of language transform both the vertical (the relationship between a believer and the Transcendent) and the horizontal dimension of spiritual experience (the relationship with other believers) through the techno-discursive manipulations of several dimensions of distance – viz. spatial, temporal, epistemic, axiological, and emotional distance – cognitive in nature and necessarily social in its implications. Unlike traditional prayer practices, which are bound by specific times and places, digital prayer walls allow users to engage in prayer and spiritual reflection at any time, thus creating an ongoing sacred experience beyond physical boundaries. Global accessibility enables believers from different geographic locations to participate in communal prayer, regardless of physical distance. The option to submit prayers anonymously, creating a more inclusive environment for those who might feel uncomfortable sharing in a physical space, leads to disinhibition effect and, as a result, greater self-disclosure, while notifications when others pray for submitted requests enhance a sense of solidarity. These affordances also change agency and authority dynamics, as participants assume active roles in shaping the communal and sacred experience (Campbell 2007, Karis 2020). In its comparative analysis of five different online prayer walls, the paper demonstrates how the technology-enabled proximization dynamics affect discursive practices and, possibly, spiritual experience.