A Plan to improve Buddhist Cultural Contents in the area of 21st century digital contents: Focusing on Missionary Strategies for Youth and Implication for Buddism Education

ABSTRACT

The youths’s excessive consumption of digital media is recognized as a problem. It’s not enough to say that they are addicted to games, sensational videos, and media dealing with violent themes. In fact, they are inferior in quality for their amount. There is an urgent need to come up with measures to grow youths who are blind consumers and victims of the media designed solely for commercial purposes to be independent and creative and to keep them from losing their morality. This study aimed to present directions and alternatives for youth missionary activities through innovations in the development of digital content of Buddhist culture. Therefore, it has first confirmed that Buddhist cultural content should achieve all of religiosity, publicity, and popularity, the basic directions (定向) of religious cultural content. Next, it has confirmed various backgrounds, such as the characteristics of youths’s consumption behaviors, activeness in interactions, emotional anxiety, following idols recklessly, psychosocial support, etc., concerning the consumption of digital content. As a result, it has confirmed that the current digital content of Buddhist culture satisfy some of youths’s characteristics. However, it has been confirmed that limitations, such as lack of customized content for each level, insufficient reflection of interests, and lack of management through the use of content, are still significant to fully respond to such characteristics. Some measures have been proposed to promote religiosity, publicity, and popularity, which were previously presented as the basic directions of digital content of Buddhist culture, for the improvement of those limitations. First, for the improvement of religiosity, the following five improvement plans have been suggested, taking the 24-hour internet audio service “Empathy(Gonggam)” as an example. They include providing music to Buddhist youths depending on whether they are elementary, junior, or high school students, selectively providing youths with gentle songs that purify their emotions in pop songs that teenagers prefer, performing mental health mentoring with active communication optimized for youths and providing them with a useful advice for psychological and social support through DJs only for them, providing youths