Dr Marta Kołodziejska’s project, funded in the competition for research projects at CESS
16 10 2024
The project of dr Marta Kołodziejska from the Faculty of Sociology “The Hollow App Universe: Analyzing a Mediatized Religious World through the lens of Deep Mediatization” was funded in the competition for research projects at the Centre of Excellence in Social Sciences.
The project received funding in the amount of 79 600,00 PLN.
The Hallow App, which is promoted as a ‘Catholic prayer app’, has become extremely popular since the Covid-19 pandemic, which can be linked to extensive online promotion and marketing efforts (social media profiles and ads, videos on a dedicated YouTube channel), promotion of the app by influencers, and by the actor playing the lead role – that of Jesus – in the popular American series The Chosen, which presents the life of Christ and the Apostles. All these activities involve different audiences, both those connected to the Catholic Church and those outside, so that we can speak of a whole universe of the Hallow app, spanning different types of media and involving various communities. This universe is an excellent example of the impact of the processes of mediatization on religious communities and institutions, which incorporate in their communication a variety of media that intersect with each other, and draw on a range of secular discourses, from those related to wellness, therapeutic discourses, to marketing, among others. For media and religion researchers, it is thus a source of insight into how the digital revolution manifests itself at different levels of the religious community and what consequences it has for religious communication in general.
How does this communication take place within the universe of the Hallow app? What types of media are part of it, how do they engage the audience? What language do the content creators use to communicate with the audiences, i.e. to what extent do they draw on religious and secular discourses (e.g. therapeutic, wellness-related) – and to what end? The project ‘Hallow App Universe: Analyzing a Mediatized Religious World through the lens of Deep Mediatization’ will help to answer these questions. Through mixed (qualitative and quantitative) analysis of the app, social media content and communication flows between different media in the Hallow universe, the project will allow us to better understand how, in today’s mediatized world, religious digital media become the centres around which community is built, and to identify the communication processes by which this community functions in different types of media simultaneously.