“Another place of God on the Net”. The history of Old Believer Internet

Abstract

The paper considers how Old Believer media field on the Internet was created and expanded. Based on interviews with clergy and active representatives of different communities involved in the development of the Old Believer Internet, as well as observations in the digital environment, the origins, main stages and features of the media policy of Russian Old Believers are traced. The starting point can be considered the appearance of email newsletters in the late 1990s, and already at the turn of 2000–2001 young Old Believers, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church and Pomorian Old-Orthodox Church, came up with the idea of a website for the Old Believers of all denominations. The article examines the processes of the emergence and expansion of the Old Believer presence on the Internet, which were accompanied by discussions related to legitimizing the use of new technologies, negotiations concerning the boundaries of what is permissible, and the development of one’s own media policy and behavior strategies on the Internet. Throughout history, attempts have been made to create general resources for Old Believers of all denominations, which turn out to be short-lived due to competing logics in views both on the development of the Old Believers in general, and on the functions of media platforms, content selection, personal preferences, etc. As a result, media field is fragmented, there are a large number of platforms on which representatives of different denominations communicate, conduct educational and missionary work separately from each other.