Since the late 2000s, the focus on gathering and analyzing “big data” has helped humanities scholars develop significant insights about trends in human behavior. Yet “small data” can be useful as well. While many impacts of websites, social media, and social networking sites appear large in scale, others manifest in small ways, with capillary impacts that build over time. This panel brings together four case studies that examine the role and impact played by the “micro” among particular national and religious communities, considering micro politics, micro debates, micro networks, and micro publics. In doing so, they take seriously the specific affordances of the various platforms used for these “micro” engagements, from the hyper-visuality of Instagram to the intimacy of Facebook. They highlight both how individual platforms support particular online activities and how individuals and/or groups use multiple platforms to amplify and reinforce their credibility and/or community feeling: Twitter posts amplify YouTube video clips, or apps reinforce website messages. At the same time, they also complicate and nuance the micropolitical affordances of these platforms.
The first paper ethnographically examine the post-revolutionary Egyptian Facebook, delineating how the platform is collectively imagined and appropriated for various ends in an authoritarian postcolonial context. Caught in a prolonged post-revolutionary crisis and bereft of a future to look up to, growing groups of middle-class Egyptians adopt Facebook to mobilize vintage images of what they frame as the “good old days”. This paper examines these nostalgic online communities that, under the extreme depoliticization of the Egyptian public sphere which followed the return to military authoritarianism in 2014, decided to fashion themselves as “apolitical” spaces, refraining from defining their nostalgia with any historical periodisation or political regime. Instead, they define their nostalgia as directed towards a bygone moral and social order that once provided Egypt with stability and an authentic identity. The paper posits two interconnected questions. First, more broadly, how are nationalist nostalgic discourses formulated over social media platforms across the world? Second, more specifically to Egypt, how do these nostalgic discourses annihilate the dreams of the 2011 revolution?
The second paper investigates ongoing questions about how and whether pious Muslims can use emoticons, and on how continuing debates over emoticon usage illuminate the relationship between ordinary believer agency and contemporary religious authority. It describes them as micro debates because concerns over emoticon usage are not central in theological, ritual, or behavioral debates – but their impact ripples out as ordinary Muslims encounter, participate, and respond to clerical guidance on emoticon usage. The interplay between clerics and ordinary believers suggests a multi-directional approach to claiming, invoking, and deploying authority that helps give nuance to what some scholars have termed a “crisis of authority” in Sunni Islam.
The third paper explores how two Hindu ritual applications, parampara.app and VR Devotee, are incentivized to produce micronetworks of caste-privileged users while disrupting Hindu orthodox traditions which privilege the efficacy of physical sacred spaces. In this sense, the essay argues that while these applications inadvertently raise questions about the efficacy and authority of digital Hindu rituals, the demands of their user base necessitate a ritual inventory that inscribes Hindu caste hierarchies into their web-based applications.
The fourth paper examines the social media accounts of a Jain organization that the author argues constitutes a “globalized micro-public” within the transnational Jain community, with its targeted appeal to class-privileged Jain youths seeking connection to their religious and cultural heritage and finding it in their hyper-individualized spirituality combined with a nationalist approach to charitable service.
Together, these papers argue for the value of insights on the digital’s complex impact on culture, politics, and religion that can be gleaned from small-scale studies, suggesting the micro’s capacity to have a larger analytic impact.
