The Digital Landscape!

Due to the incredible technological of humanity, culture is no longer only a physical place, it can also be a place made up of code, images, and bits of data. I'm talking of course about the digital landscape! My fieldworking is about Islam in Rhode Island, but more specifically the Masjid Al-Islam in North Smithfield, Rhode Island, as such I checked around online to find out a bit more about the digital footprint of the community I hope to learn more about. I chose a couple sites to look at, but mainly the wordpress website of the mosque itself. Taking a look at the graphics and photographs on the page can tell a lot right from the start. In the upper area of the site we can see a picture that I believe was taken looking at the dome and minaret of the mosque. In addition to this, important dates are laid out in an almost similar style to my own blog, albeit with more flare and pictures. Posts are assigned in order by the day they were made, with the most recent ones being at the top. At this time one of the first main posts is an advertisement for a "Hajj Workshop" with a picture of what I believe to be the grand mosque in mecca front and center. This post in particular draws my attention as it's obvious care was taken to make a custom graphic to advertise the event. On top of that, invoking the grand mosque front and center makes me think that this is likely an extremely important workshop. Taking a look at the text on the page it's extremely clear that this is a site for a local mosque. While the font seems to be a basic font such as Times New Roman or Comic Sans, there are many words taken from Islam, anglicized words, and graphics containing what I can assume to be Arabic font. The author of the website is the Imam of the mosque, who appears to run it himself. The site is a wordpress site, a free blog much like my own. It's a very basic site spruced up with a bit of Islam-related graphics, but the audience is obviously those who attend the mosque or who are looking to learn a bit more about it. At the top we have links to prayer schedules for each month, as well as links for newsletters, and a biography of the Imam of the mosque. The blog gives off a bit of a mystical feeling, or at least attempts to. The background is white but all the graphics lend towards the idea that this is religious or esoteric in nature. In the main graphic of the grand mosque we see what appear to be wisps of air and something which sparkles flaring out around the mosque itself. We also have a heavy use of symbolism with graphics to convey that each promoted event is one that is religious is nature. Despite all of this it is still very obvious that it's a project with limited resources, as it's a simple wordpress site in the end, and it appears the general settings weren't tampered with too much. After searching around a bit more, I found a little bit more about the culture, but not in a way I would have hoped. An quick search yielded that the community had asked for greater protection from police after their mosque was vandalized in the same weekend as an infamous attack on a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. Both of these incidents occurred in August of 2012 and while time has passed, I will have to tread a bit more carefully as the community might still be on guard against suspicious outsiders such as myself. A lot about the culture can be learned right from the Imam's bio on the wordpress site. We can see where he received his training, as well as his personal history and what sort of initiatives he works on outside being an Imam and a Mufti. One thing that struck me in particular about the site, is that every mention of "Allah" is followed by the abbreviation (S.W.T) I wondered a bit about this and had to look elsewhere for explanation, but found quickly on wikipedia that it stands for "Subhanahu wa ta'ala" which can be translated roughly to "Glorified and Exalted be He". It seems that it's a form of respect and reverence for their god Allah to give praise to him whenever his name is spoken or even typed. It's pretty amazing how much I was able to discover from just taking a close look at the website of the mosque. With digital culture and the "space" of the mosque now covered, it'll be time for me to finally make contact with the community!