Online – Heidelberg Journal of religions on the Internet 1.1 (2005) 1 DISCOVERING THE INVISIBLE INTERNET METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF SEARCHING RELIGION ON THE INTERNET 1 OLIVER KRÜGER In his well-known work, The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens speaks of the disembedment of social interaction from temporal and spatial conditions as a distinguishing feature of modernity. With the beginning of the modern era, he says, social space becomes increasingly independent of concrete places. Social interaction involves partners who do not share the same geographical space and whose communication is realized over spatial distances. 2 In discussing the transfer of rituals online, we seem to be confronted theoretically and empirically with the disembedment of ritual interaction from its traditional temporal and spatial conditions. The acquisition of ”ritual competence” and its normative implications is usually attached to the experience of the socially structured life-world (Lebenswelt). 3 Thus, ritual competence is a result of a learning process within a social community that requires regular participation in rituals and the gradual mastery of specific ritual knowledge. This knowledge is normally controlled by an institutionalized hierarchy. Here, the constitutive acts of communication gain their validity and traditionalizing power through an inter-subjective consensus, which already includes the participants' reflected reference to the life-world; and the acquisition of ritual competence implies the adoption of a collective system of values and beliefs. 4 The relevance of the recent transfer of ritual knowledge and elements of ritual performances into the context of the new Internet medium becomes clear if we consider the ritual theory of the Durkheimian School. 5 For Durkheim, the common experience of rituals was not only the basis of a religious community but also the foundation of society. 6 1 I would like to thank Heidi Campbell and Gernot Meier for their helpful contributions. 2 See Giddens 1992, 17-29. I discuss the ambivalence of Gidden’s metaphor of the disembedment of religious communities on the Internet in Krüger 2004. 3 See Goffman 1967; Schütz & Luckmann, 1979:154-172, 293-313. 4 See Habermas 1981, 182-228. 5 See Dawson 2004, 75-76. 6 See Durkheim 1925, 593-648.