Talk about wedding disasters: On the big day, someone blows up the beautiful cathedral where the nuptials are planned, forcing the couple to exchange vows in a backup location — an airport runway.
All of this happened on the Internet, not in reality. Or was it reality? An international group of scholars debated that and other questions yesterday as part of the four-day International Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture, which began Wednesday and concludes today at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel.
Conference organizer John Ferré said the conference is focusing on topics ranging from Internet religion to media coverage of the clergy sexual-abuse scandal to religious-themed entertainment.
"We are obviously media-saturated people," said Ferré, professor of communication at the University of Louisville. "Religion is important to many individuals' lives, and certainly culturally (it's) very important. When you look at the cross-section of how religion is communicated in our culture, you learn a lot about faith, you earn a lot about the culture, and you learn a lot about the media."
About 120 people from 24 countries and six continents are attending the conference, he said. When such conferences began in the early 1990s, much of the attention focused on themes such as television evangelism. Now there's "a lot more on the Internet," Ferré said.
Stewart Hoover of the University of Colorado presented findings that 64percent of Americans with Internet access have used it for religious or spiritual purposes, such as sending religious-themed e-mail, reading news on religion or researching religious holidays.
He said people who are connected to religious congregations are more likely to explore religion online than others. That casts some doubt on early hype about the Internet as a setting in which people could shed their dogmas and identities and create a new kind of religious practice, he and other researchers said.
But others described online experimentation with religious-themed rituals such as weddings and funerals. Researcher Joon Lee showed that Korean women are posting memorial messages to lost loved ones in cyberspace, and that a computer user can even place virtual flowers at online grave sites.
Jason Shim, a researcher at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, described the wedding episode mentioned above.
It occurred in the online program known as Second Life, in which participants meet online and use graphics to create a virtual world and interact with each other.
Participants built a cathedral there and one couple spent weeks preparing a virtual wedding. Because the cathedral required so much computer-storage space, a saboteur was able to destroy it.
Shim said the saboteur objected to a marriage done in a computer world and said it was foolish to have a wedding in a "video game" rather than in "reality."
He said that episode clearly showed how some people are earnest about using the Internet for religious and other rituals, while others see it as a game.