Alternative Spiritualities and Identities on Social Media: Divination Workers’ Identity Performances on YouTube

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

Abstract Despite the increased scholarly interest about the role of social media in religious identity construction, spiritual identity construction on social media is an ignored subject in digital religion literature. This paper examines how divination workers perform spiritual identities as members of the digital spiritual culture to shed light on a niche yet significant area of digital spirituality, and how its practitioners navigate and create their spiritual identities. A qualitative approach is adopted to analyse three astrologer profiles on YouTube. Findings show that healing, mentoring and spiritual guidance are three important themes in divination workers’ spiritual identity construction on YouTube. These findings provide concrete examples of how spiritual identities are enacted and adapted in digital environments. The paper extends the existing literature by demonstrating how digital platforms actively create new spiritual identities rather than merely being extensions of offline spiritual activities. The paper also extends the scope of traditional understandings of identity and spirituality by employing the concepts in an entirely digital space. By exploring a novel context that is currently underexplored in the field of digital religion, the paper makes a valuable contribution to the field by unpacking the spiritual identities on social media.