TY - JOUR T1 - The Internet Highway and Religious Communities: Mapping and Contesting Spaces in Religion-Online JF - The Information Society Y1 - 2009 A1 - Pauline Hope Cheong A1 - Huang, Shirlena A1 - Poon, Jessie A1 - Casas, Irene KW - Authority KW - community KW - geography KW - internet KW - theory of religion online AB - We examine ‘religion-online’, an underrepresented area of research in new media, communication, and geography, with a multi-level study of the online representation and (re)-presentation of Protestant Christian organizations in Singapore, which has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world and also believers affiliated with all the major world religions. We first critically discuss and empirically examine how online technologies are employed for religious community building in novel and diverse ways. Then we investigate the role religious leaders play through their mental representations of the spatial practices and scales through which their religious communities are imagined and practiced online. We show how churches use the multimodality of the Internet to assemble multiple forms of visible data and maps to extend geographic sensibilities of sacred space and create new social practices of communication. VL - 25 UR - http://www.paulinehopecheong.com IS - 5 ER -