Technological otherness in mediatization of religion: The example of the Foma project

Using the example of the Foma project, which operates with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church but is financed by secular sources, the article examines the work of a religious media project with audience fragmentation, which is characteristic of the entire contemporary media ecosystem. The author puts forward the hypothesis that the diversity of modern technologies that allow for delivery of information with a high degree of personalization leads to the emergence of a new type of otherness – a technological one: instead of presenting the «other» in the content itself, modern multi-platformed media projects can divide information and deliver different parts of it to the corresponding segments of the audience. Using as a base the ideas of deep mediatization, new materiality and the discourse-material knot, the author attempts to identify how exactly the link between materiality, content and patterns of media consumption works in multi-platform media projects in this shift from otherness in content to technological otherness. To test the hypothesis, the author analyzes the platforms on which the Foma project is presented and the formats with which it works. This analysis is supplemented by interviews with the creators and leaders of the project, which reveal their understanding of media consumption among the project audience and how the understanding of media consumption influences the formation of the agenda, the choice of the format of the produced content and the methods of its delivery to the audience. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that the hypothesis is partially confirmed, and further development of the proposed idea requires work with a more subtle system of distinctions, in particular, with respect to what part of materiality plays a leading role in the formation of technological otherness. Analysis of the selected project shows that the ramified network of delivery of diverse content not only does not work to form a new type of otherness, but, on the contrary, is a strategy for overcoming it.

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