Aspects of the popularity of some Internet sites of denominations in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet

Abstract

The study argues for the need to analyze the activities of religious confessions in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, which is a fundamentally new communication mechanism. Having studied that new type of communication of a religious organization and its followers through a detailed description of the structure of the sites, one can give a general description of the resources, which together can become the basis for further religious studies and sociological studies of the quality of the assimilation of the virtual space by religious confessions. The statistical method of information analysis is used as the leading method. The authors analyze the content of the official websites of various religious denominations in the sphere of the Russian-speaking Internet; provide a general description of the rating lists leaders for the sites with religious topics from which it can be concluded that they all have the necessary cultural and legal authority, which legitimizes their use and access to them in the minds of network users. In addition, it is argued that sites have the necessary information content, contain relevant information, and they are able to satisfy the interests of users with minimal effort. With all that in mind, it may be said that the study can supplement the area of knowledge devoted to the study of the involvement of religious organizations in the modern life of the information age.