Social Media Skills for Interfaith Dialogue

Aided by technology lots of people today consume media many hours daily, regardless a mere access, media as a facility is mainly used to surf net, get directions, do e-shopping, chat with friends and share messages among its many other applications. The present research tries to answer why social media should not be used in religion field for getting familiarity with different religions, exchanging religious ideas and in general for interfaith dialogue and critical thinking about. Even to decline the extent of violence, genocide, massacres and killings human beings witness these days due to faith differences, the holy Quran and scholars involved in religion sciences encourage people from all over the world to read about and get familiar with other religions. So far many papers have been written on the issue and many believe that it is the duty of elites to discuss about the problem and lead the people to the right way. The present paper however hypothesizes that all individuals can use social media to discuss about faiths and exchange their ideas if of course they know how to interpret the contexts and contents without bias or avoid stereotyping, while it should be kept in mind that to do so one needs some skills. Thus it follows Potter’s skills pattern composed of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of media messages. This descriptive research believes that so far the skills for dealing with media products have not been publicized in many countries. It suggests media can be used to educate people with media literacy in the filed of interfaith public discussion.