Russian Buddhism and social media: Tuvan Buddhist online-communities on Vkontakte
The evolution of social media in recent years has demonstrated a new dimension of the correlation between tradition and innovation in religious life. Social media have become a special transformative space for Buddhist communities, a space which does not limit itself to using new information technologies. It also challenges these communities to preserve tradition and adapt to changes, get involved into global culture, and protect ethnic values. The article examines the usage of media by Buddhist communities, taking Tuvan online communities on the social network VKontakte as our case study. We will specifically focus on the largest online Tuvan Buddhist VK community "Saryg Shazhyn Tyvada" (36000 users), which shows a steady growth in users. It is also among the largest Buddhism-related communities on this social network. With specially developed software, an automated data collection was carried out, which made possible to build a social graph. The analysis of the graph made use of mathematical modeling, namely, cluster analysis and calculation of its topological properties, assortativeness coefficient, degree distribution of nodes and betweenness degree. Tuvan Buddhist online communities have pronounced ethno-religious peculiarities, an orientation towards reproducing ethnic tradition, the use of the Tuvan language, and a relatively high density of social communication. It can be assumed that for many users, participation in such online groups is one of the mechanisms for broadcasting ethnicity and adherence to traditions.