Monique Ingalls (University of Cambridge): Worship on Screen: Congregational Singing, Digital Devotional Images, and the New Audiovisual Iconography
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| Description: |
Social media platforms such as YouTube have enabled music, images, and religious devotional practices to become conjoined in new and complex ways. This paper uses internet ethnography and multimedia analysis to explore the devotional practices surrounding several popular evangelical Christian worship music videos on YouTube. In these devotional videos, amateur creators overlay commercial audio recordings of their favorite congregational worship songs with a variety of visual effects, including moving imagery, film clips, still photographs, song lyrics, and bible verses.
This paper sketches the shape of the new networked worship practices enabled by the creation and sharing of these small-screen devotional videos and highlights the broader social and economic implications of their use. I argue that the worship video can be regarded as a form of twenty-first century audiovisual iconography—a multimedia devotional resource that draws together the preexisting strands of evangelical visual piety surrounding mass-mediated devotional images and the 'worship lifestyle' invoked by commercial worship music recordings. By following worship videos’ complex pathways of circulation, I demonstrate the ways in which musical devotional practices are woven together as they move from the small screens of private worship to the large screens of public worship and back again. As these videos play an increasingly important role in (re-)mediating worship music, evangelical congregational worship is being transformed into a site of audiovisual convergence in which song lyrics, images, and music are combined into a powerful experiential whole. Religious audiovisual media insert themselves into the structures of daily life which enables them, in conjunction with a range of other offline practices, to shape embodied ways of listening, viewing, and worshipping. |
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| Created: | 2014-04-14 11:54 |
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| Collection: | Creativity, Circulation and Copyright: Sonic and Visual Media in the Digital Age |
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge |
| Copyright: | Glenn Jobson |
| Language: | eng (English) |
| Keywords: | CRASSH; Monique Ingalls; |
| Abstract: | Social media platforms such as YouTube have enabled music, images, and religious devotional practices to become conjoined in new and complex ways. This paper uses internet ethnography and multimedia analysis to explore the devotional practices surrounding several popular evangelical Christian worship music videos on YouTube. In these devotional videos, amateur creators overlay commercial audio recordings of their favorite congregational worship songs with a variety of visual effects, including moving imagery, film clips, still photographs, song lyrics, and bible verses.
This paper sketches the shape of the new networked worship practices enabled by the creation and sharing of these small-screen devotional videos and highlights the broader social and economic implications of their use. I argue that the worship video can be regarded as a form of twenty-first century audiovisual iconography—a multimedia devotional resource that draws together the preexisting strands of evangelical visual piety surrounding mass-mediated devotional images and the 'worship lifestyle' invoked by commercial worship music recordings. By following worship videos’ complex pathways of circulation, I demonstrate the ways in which musical devotional practices are woven together as they move from the small screens of private worship to the large screens of public worship and back again. As these videos play an increasingly important role in (re-)mediating worship music, evangelical congregational worship is being transformed into a site of audiovisual convergence in which song lyrics, images, and music are combined into a powerful experiential whole. Religious audiovisual media insert themselves into the structures of daily life which enables them, in conjunction with a range of other offline practices, to shape embodied ways of listening, viewing, and worshipping. |
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