Social Media Skills for Interfaith Dialogue

Abstract

Aided by technology lots of people nowadays use online media many hours per day; regardless a mere access, online media is mainly used to surf net, get directions, do e-shopping, chat with friends and share messages among its many other applications while the present research tries to answer how social media as a part of online life could be used in religion field to be familiar with different religions, exchange religious ideas and in general for interfaith dialogue for peacemaking purposes such as decreasing the extent of violence, massacres, genocides and wars human beings witness these days due to faith differences. Even scholars work in religion sciences encourage people from all over the world to read about and get familiar with other religions. So far many papers have been written on the issue and it is believed that this is the duty of the elites to discuss about the problem and lead the people to the right way. The present paper however suggests that social media users can apply it to discuss about faiths and exchange their relevant religious ideas if of course they know how to analyze, evaluate and synthesize contents without bias. The authors of the present paper believe that so far the skills for dealing with media products have not been publicized in many countries. Thus, following Potter's media skills pattern, they refer to three skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of media messages.