Desecularization of Instagram users; providing grounded theory

The main view of thinkers, with respect to the impact of cyberspace on religion, is that its continuous use would help lead to “secularization” of individuals and society. However, it seems that this process, under the influence of some interfering factors, has overturned and, in some cases, even strengthened the religious outlook of some users of the virtual space, a process which we call “desecularization”. In this article, the attempt is being made to examine what are the most critical factors that enhance desecularization in social networks, and how desecularized users resist those secularizing effects? This research has been done using a qualitative approach and based on grounded theory as well as the theoretical sampling method. The statistical population was undergraduate students from universities of Tehran who were religious and each of them having about a thousand followers on Instagram. Finally, 27 of them were interviewed through structured questionnaire. MAXQDA20 software was used to encode and analyze the data which were deduced in three stages of sub-and-main concepts. The 10 categories that were selected include: pre-network context of the individual; scientific protective armor; transnational knowledge; activism power of users; religious lifestyle; reminding and meditating about life's priorities for users; maturity in interactions; internal and external care; intellectual patience and to build a social network with indigenous characteristics. All these aforementioned characteristics are gathered under one title called “conscious struggle”.