Cultured Technology: Internet and Religious Fundamentalism

This paper presents a theoretical framework to understand the relationship between religious fundamentalist communities and the Internet, through addressing four dimensions of tensions and challenges: hierarchy, patriarchy, discipline, and seclusion. We develop the concept of cultured technology, and analyze the ways communities reshape technology and make it as part of the ir culture, while on the other hand allowing this technology to make certain changes in their customary way of life and in their unwritten laws. Later, we exemplify our theoretical framework through an empirical examination of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel. Our empirical study is based on original dataset of 686,192 users and 60,346 virtual communities, while also relying on extensive literature review and secondary data. The results show the complexity of interactions between religious fundamentalism and Internet, and invite further discussions of cultured technology as a means to adapt Internet and to be adapted into it in various communities that incline to challenge technological innovations.