[ 153 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 THEATER OF TRIUMPH AND TRANSGRESSION: RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE ON HOSPITALITY/ HOSTILITY IN THE VIRAL COMMUNICATION DURING THE PANDEMIC Leonard Chrysostomos Epafras Sekolah Pascasarjana UGM, Yogyakarta, Indonesia Email: leonard.e@ugm.ac.id Hendrikus Paulus Kaunang Sekolah Pascasarjana UGM, Yogyakarta, Indonesia Email: erichkaunang@ugm.ac.id Jekonia Tarigan Sekolah Pascasarjana UGM, Yogyakarta, Indonesia Email: jekonia.tarigan@mail.ugm.ac.id David Akbar Hasyemi Rafsanjani Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies, Yogyakarta, Indonesia Email: david.akbar89@gmail.com ABSTRACT The present article is the outcome of the research project on religious discourse in social media (socmed) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research focuses on the concept of hospitality and hostility, through which a welcoming, along with hostile and unfriendly attitude are displayed by netizens toward other people, to understand the nature of social relationships over digital platforms. The research employs Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Social Media Analysis to explore and visualize viral communication on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The framework is viral communication as condensed sequences of actions revolv- ing around controversial topics. Several topics under scrutiny, among others, are klepon Islami, Hagia Sophia, and Pope Francis’ controversies. Jacques Derrida mainly informs the discourse of hospitality/hostility. The result demonstrated the sporadic vulnerability of traditional understanding of hospitality. It appeared in the presence of information arbiters as communication actors, taking the middle position and mediating controversial topics. The employment of SNA in deal- ing with interpersonal virtues in social media is promising, as it demonstrates its mechanism and making in a specific communication context. It allows for a deeper understanding and exploration of the theory of mediatization. Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, hospitality, hostility, hostipitality, viral communication [ 154 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 INTRODUCTION The present article is the outcome of a research project investigating religious discourse on hospitality and hostility in social media (socmed) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The subject of the investigation is the selected controversial topics as a manifestation of a viralized form of communication (Postill & Epafras, 2018). The research sought to understand the nature of social relationships within specific religious virtue over digital platforms in a social crisis, such as a pandemic. The etymology of hospitality and hostility came from the interrelated Latin words hospes and hostis. Hospes means “stranger,” while hostis is both “guest” and “enemy,” thus embodying two contradictory conditions, both welcoming and hostile to the Others (“Hospes,” 2012, pp. 885–888; Kearney, 2010, p. 38). Hence, the tandem of hospitality and hostility created tension and ushered a way of questioning the existence of conditional hospitality and the limit of both in socmed. Socmed realizes a unique context for the discourse under scrutiny as the expression of hospitality/hostility, like any social, religious, or cultural virtues, is mediated and operated within the instrumentalized social platform and digital technology that conflates rationality and emotional impulse and championed actors’ performance and eloquence over their intentionality. Socmed is a friendly place to create nanostories and nanopolitics for the “ordinary” actors dealing with religious issues, complicating traditional religious authorities' position (cf. Postill, 2014; Postill & Epafras, 2018, p. 107). Furthermore, subjectivity in this setting appears in behavioral attribution (nodes, socmed accounts, hashtags, mentions, associations, etc.) rather than observable activities, such as in an offline context. On the other hand, the social interaction within the dynamic of socmed is haunted by the presence of bots (internet robots), poly-identification, pseudonymized, and anonymized actors exist along with the real accounts, hence complicating the meaningful social relationship. While the research context is the COVID-19 pandemic, the present investigation limits the discussion on the immediate effect of the pandemic on religion. It expands it to other religious-connected controversies, such as during the earlier period of the crises when there was uproar among religionists in relationship with a drastic transformation of their religious practice, such as the regular ritual pushed out from the worship houses. Among those controversies ensued was the inauguration of the Catholic Bishop of Manggarai and Jama’at Tabligh’s transmission clustering. Nevertheless, the present research focuses more detail on the following controversies, i.e., [ 155 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 “klepon Islami” (Islamic klepon), “Hagia Sophia repurpose,” “Pope Francis and the civic rights of LGBT,” and lastly, the conflict between Muhammad Rizieq Shihab (renowned as Habib Rizieq Shihab, from now on referred as HRS) and Nikita Mirzani (from now on referred as NM). The investigation of viral communication is visualized through the employment of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Social Media Analysis, focusing on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as the source of data collection and analysis. The discussion on hospitality/hostility was informed by Jacques Derrida (Derrida, 2000, 2002). At the beginning of the research in the May-June 2020 period, fourteen scholarly works were recorded in the first three pages of Google Scholar, which explicitly discuss the religious concern of the pandemic. Among those fourteen, twelve were related to Islamic discourse, and two were Christian (e.g., Campbell, 2020; Kowalczyk et al., 2020; Wildman et al., 2020). But none specifically discuss religious discourse on hospitality/hostility, let alone in connection with social media performance. This condition bears, however, the present undertaking's potential to contribute insight into the larger religious discourse in the context of the pandemic. Religious actors often utilize crises to enhance hope and strengthen social solidarity, but others exploit them for specific agendas. Concern such as COVID-19 is tangible to religion. Early on, the United Bible Society organized prayer rallies for Wuhan and China. At the same time, when China is still struggling to contain the spreading, a prominent Indonesian preacher, Abdul Somad Batubara, renowned as Ustad Somad, in one of his sermons, quoted to remark that Coronavirus is a God’s army (tentara Allah) protects Uyghur Muslims from the Chinese “infidel” government. A pastor of an Indonesian mega-church in the capital city made a claim quoting from “a research” that speaks of the tongue (glossolalia), a manifestation of the work of the Holy Spirit might boost human immunity to stand against Coronavirus, hence ensuring his parishioners not to be afraid to join the Sunday service in his church. When the outbreak got out of control, major Indonesian religious organizations such as Indonesia’s Ulama Council, Muhammadiyah, Nahdlatul Ulama, the Indonesian Communion of Churches, and the Indonesian Bishops Conference issued instructions to limit the people movement, closure of the public prayer house and refocusing the praying activities at home. The above responses are examples of the spectrum of religious talks on COVID-19. Some made sense; others were too distinctive and could only be understood within the respected religious community. They might tell us more than just the rhetoric of eternity. In the Indonesian social landscape, [ 156 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 these actively influence the socio-political landscape. It is the dawn of the online religion age. The COVID-19 outbreak forced traditional and organized religion deep into the digital realm. COMMUNICABLE DISEASES AND COMMUNICATING RELIGION Communicable diseases, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 (Coronavirus), are not only medical facts. Once classified as “infectious” by the authorities (WHO, government officials, religious leaders, and others), they transformed into a social topic, the narrative of danger, an outbreak narrative. Priscilla Wald (Wald, 2008, p. 2) further observed the communicable disease. “[I]s also a foundational concept in studying religion and society, with a long history of explaining how beliefs circulate in social interactions. The idea of contagion evolved throughout the twentieth century through the commingling of theories about microbes and attitudes about social change. Communicable disease compels attention — for scientists and the lay public alike — not only because of the devastation it can cause but also because the circulation of microbes materializes the transmission of ideas. The interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community. Disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact.” There is no more risk and a “what-if ” scenario as a general topic. It became the sublimation of the risk and resided within the social network. The disease evolved with the human projection of life (e.g., “we fear God alone, not the corona”), the dramatization of life (e.g., panic buying), human self-understanding (e.g., “besides COVID-19, we are facing the plague of foolishness”), political decision (e.g., debates on locking down a region), and other complexities. Viral communication is understood in two ways: transmission producing a series of trivial nanostories and nanopolitics on particular agenda setting by the netizens employing socmed as viral media such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LINE (cf. Postill, 2014). Such viralized communication may drive collective action that changes the socio-political landscape, as manifested in Jakarta’s gubernatorial election 2017. Secondly, religious discourse is “controversies, or social dramas, triggered by a perceived breach of the religious space’s precarious moral order in Indonesia” (Postill & Epafras, 2018, p. 101). It is a space event that involves “condensed sequences of actions that transform a social space” (Postill & Epafras, 2018, p. 104). [ 157 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 The digital realm created and enforced the echo chamber environment in which a social media follower of an account tended to enliven the ideological, political, and religious leaning they are attaching to, often actively discrediting others beyond their social space. Privatized social spaces such as WhatsApp and Telegram groups are a haven for such engagement. While it produces productive and constructive information and discussion, the closed-minded religious group nurtures a restricted religious outlook and quickly raises and distributes hoaxes, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Viral forms of communication are the consequence of such structure and logic. It is often loud and raucous. Such a condition might blur the sense of threshold in a digital frontier of interaction – no welcoming greet to the guest in the digital realm. Hence, the speech it produces is susceptible to the extreme perception of the Other. Viral communication is temporary unless a plausible supporting condition is met to make a public “consensus,” or in a popular term, it becomes “trending.” It is ephemeral since it will always change and create a different arena of controversy. In many cases, such communication appeared in the appeal for collective action on, for instance, humanitarian concerns such as the victims of Lombok’s earthquake or Palu’s tsunami. However, testifying to the increasing conservatism in the religious landscape, the viral form of religious communication also came with a price. The line between civility and incivility often blanketed with religious jargon, is often blurred, in which rancorous messages and comments are exchanged unguarded. The article argues that COVID-19 is part of the human narrative and tells about humanity's interdependence with others, including nature, microbes, and viruses. The virus is an enabler, an actant through which humanity is being on trial, interrogated, and demanded transformation. The “trial” is the virtue of hospitality, or, on the other hand, enhanced the demarcation of the self and hostile to the Other. Derrida introduced a neologism, hostipitality, an embodiment of hospitality/ hostility (Derrida, 2000, p. 45, 2002, pp. 358–420). Hospitality is considered an aporia, “a dead end,” an interruption, and a terminal invited for rupture and transformation. Hospitality, in this sense, is a paradox, as it started by losing the sense of home (chez soi) while challenging the singularity and unconditional hospitality. The “homeless” may come to decide to welcome the Other, both as a stranger and an enemy. The dynamic, furthermore, is also upon the nature of welcoming that there is always a tension between hospitality as a “must” and without “must-ness,” between “ready” and “not yet” (Derrida, 2002, p. 361), which is slippery and could easily fall into hostility. [ 158 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 The hostipitality might reflect in the aporia, which complicates the socialization process when the “I” becomes the center and encounters the Other, the guest, or the stranger. One possibility is that it may rebound the flow of the process back to “I” rather than to the Other, strengthening the individualization reflexively. The waging of dealing with the Other becomes “calculated” if not “transactional” as the communication is mediatized. It might limit the meaningful relationship. The corridor of comprehension is restricted by the premeditated outlook toward the Other rather than creating a new horizon of understanding. Hostility might be the effect of such a process. On the other hand, it could open an alternative path that might end with a more readiness to encounter the Other within the context of acceptance. The viral communication squeezed this flow as there is an attraction to join the battle and intensity of conversation that might succumb to the readiness to let the homeness of a digital self share with the Other’s view and to overcome the aporia. Put it together, those insights will allow the present undertaking to frame the notion of hospitality as embedded in human interaction, including within the digital platform and network. Hospitality/hostility is an aporia, an unfinished transformation process beyond the moralized unconditional hospitality. Both are seen as potency and possibilities. It will no longer turn to the normative understanding promoted by institutionalized religion. Hospitality is also understood as a philosophical, theological category, and public lingo. More than just a personal, social, and spiritual attitude toward Others and Strangers, it is also a phronesis, a practical virtue expressed, in this case, over the digital platform. Hostility in the context of social media and the internet might reflect the perceived “digital ills'' such as cyber bullying, micro-aggression, and hate spin. Those are an effect of hoaxtivism, which implies misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Moreover, it is a dramatization of transgressive collective actions. The tension between the two will be framed within the religious talk and relate to public piety, spiritual enhancement, and political contestation discourse. HOSPITALITY/HOSTILITY IN VIRALIZED COMMUNICATION The main course of the research includes the visualization of digital interaction through the SNA of tweets on the Twitter platform. Social Media Analysis detailing the SNA and expanding it through the analysis of Facebook and Instagram. Microblogging service such as Twitter is associated with the global democratic movement for their powerful influence on changing the political landscape. At the same time, Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram, are the [ 159 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 most popular SNSs (social networking sites) that visualize the digital self. Other data collection methods include the observation of the news in online media. The Big Data service providers, Astramaya and Drone Emprit provide all those activities. Figure 1. Klepon Islami and Hagia Sophia controversy (generated by Astramaya SNA). The Pandemic announcement by WHO in March immediately became a religious issue, notably on the restriction of public worship. These provide an initial interest in the present research proposal. Some cases stood prominently, i.e., the controversy over the Bishop of Manggarai's inauguration, the case of Jamaat Tabligh Corona’s cluster in India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the Korean church cluster, and the polemics among Indonesian Muslims and Christians on onsite and online worships, including the controversy among Christians on the effectivity of speak of the tongue (glossolalia) in increasing the body immunity against the Coronavirus. SNA might provide us with further insight into the discourse of hospitality. In the case of the inauguration of the Bishop, one of the numerous screen captures of Facebook discussions allowed for a reflection on the meaning of hospitality/hostility, which, as argued below, provided space for the encroachment of the existing structure; this regards the regional Roman Catholics’ structure. An excerpt of it was as follows, a Facebook account Mxxx Axxxxx: [ 160 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 “[C]onfronting with the super religious enthusiasts (orang yang mabok agama) is tough. There is a huge gap in the health standard between NTT (East Nusa Tenggara) and Jakarta and other countries. They are (Jakarta’s and other countries) overwhelmed (in dealing with the pandemic), let alone NTT. (Here) is not only the theatre of stupidity, (it is) a strange demonstration to look at the bishop with a smile on his grandeur garment while, deep down, his adherents’ hearts are seized by fear of Corona. God is not our servant; it is a waste if we are stupid and resist cooperating.” The study by Widyawati and Lon (2020) demonstrated the complexities of the inauguration event to resolve the internal crisis of Catholic leadership in the region, though at the price of violating the government stipulation on public gatherings for the health protocol. Such statements and their counterstatements might give us an understanding of how hospitality is discounted in the politics of religiosity. It further provides a sense that social media has become a powerful tool to challenge the existing religious authority, which might need to be more comfortable in regular interaction. It is even more complicated when other controversial issues, such as the polemic between a prominent Protestant preacher, Rev. Stephen Tong, and Rev. Niko Njotorahardjo from a Charismatic church on the case of the effectivity of speak of the tongue (glossolalia) to immunize the Christians, was simply continued the pre-pandemic religious contestation and historical tension between Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity of Indonesia. The above debate among Indonesian Christians and Catholics was not specifically prominent on Twitter, making it difficult to visualize it through the SNA. Klepon Islami and Hagia Sophia’s controversy were examples of religious- nuanced conversation through SNA because those potentially helped us visualize the operation of viral communication. Klepon is a traditional Javanese and popular snack from coconut, rice, and palm sugar ingredients. The controversy most probably started with a Facebook post on July 20, 2020, that criticized a poster picture organized as an advertisement entitled “Klepon (cake) is Unislamic” (Kue Klepon tidak Islami), which followed by lines, “leave the Unislamic snacks and buy the Islamic one. Various dates are available in our Shar’i shop.” While it was probably a fabricated message, it triggered a massive debate on the socmed and was picked up immediately by many online media. Drone Emprit has done the SNA (Fahmi, 2020a), while ours initiated the same by combining it with the Hagia Sophia’s controversy to observe the conflation over simultaneous events. The Hagia Sophia controversy revolves around Turkish President Recep [ 161 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 Tayyip Erdoğan’s announcement on converting the Hagia Sophia museum in Istanbul into a mosque. Formerly, it was the largest Eastern Orthodox- Byzantine church and, converted to a mosque when Constantinople fell into the Turkish hands in 1453, repurposed into a museum by the first president of the Republic of Turkey, Kemal Attatürk in 1935. Erdoğan announced on May 29, 2021, marked as the 567th anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople, to convert it to “return it to its original state” as a mosque, partly as a response to the U.S. president Donald Trump's recognition of the East Jerusalem and Golan’s Heights as belonged to Israel. Indeed, an angry international reaction ensued to the announcement (Soylu, 2020). However, our investigation focuses on the Indonesian public response to the controversy. Both observations are based on the four keywords: Islami, klepon, Hagia Sophia, and Aya Sofia in five periods, as the SNA screenshots informed the brief of a viral issue (Figure 1). These keywords only came to the entire dynamic at the end of July but slowly dissipated in August. However, as the four screenshots demonstrated, the actors appeared and retired. Different bubbles were formed and transformed, but the polarization posture was relatively retained, i.e., between the anti-Jokowi and others camps, represented by hashtags such as #klepon and variations of #jokowi and “pro-Jokowi” hashtags such as #kadrunlaknat. Klepon Islami created more heated engagement as the SNA figure dominated by it rather than Hagia Sophia. The narrative of triumphalism is strong in the discussion on Hagia Sophia. Elias Canetti (1981) observed that the crowd is an active, living, and conscious entity that is mysterious and unpredictable and could perform discrepancies and even senseless activities. The individuals sought “power” and the feeling of overcoming by tightening themselves into the crowd. This is the case of the controversy. The anti-Jokowi and the aspirants of the Islamic revived glory through the repurpose of Hagia Sophia into a mosque had tightened them into a single narrative all along. The initiative created new pride among the Muslims, as manifested in a Twitter account such as @demoxxx, which bluntly remarks, “Kebangkitan Islam itu nyata tweeps ..!!” (“the awakening of Islam is real, tweeps ...!!”). However, this encountered little resistance among the Indonesian Christians, except for official reaction from the international Christian organizations, probably because such an issue is too remote for average Christians. The two main narratives prominently represented the “anti-Jokowi” forces against a combination of “pro-Jokowi,” other “progressive” Muslims, and the rest—the former emphasis the conspiracy, allegedly volleyed by the “pro-Jokowi” camp behind the klepon incident. “Diversion” (pengalihan isu) [ 162 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 often becomes the keyword for such allegations. SNA, upon observing five periods (represented as four figures in Figure 1), demonstrated a relatively solid narrative among the “anti-Jokowis,” regardless of different accounts of centrality. At the same time, the opponent remained scattered even though it started with a prominent account such as @TretanMuslim. The “anti-Jokowi” force, though holding a vast spectrum of political and religious positions, tends to be conservative in its religious outlook. It may be confirmed the latest finding of PPIM (Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat, Centre for the Study of Islam and Society), State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah (2020, pp. iii–iv) that it found 67.2% of netizens (in Twitter and YouTube) are holding such a position. Singling out Jokowi as the epitome of an anti- Islam force ensured the consistency of the narrative making and sustainability across different topics, trending, and viral messages, such as below on the conflict between HRS and NM. Social transformation only appears through socmed engagement. Still, on the contrary, it is part of amplifying the coming final battle of the 2024 presidential election, which would not surprise if religious discourse played a significant part once again. Postill, Epafras, and Fahmi have warned that such socmed engagement might reflect unfinished business in the religious-political landscape. “Current affairs are recurrent affairs” (Postill & Epafras, 2018, p. 118), and those are a “political sentiment residual” in the Fahmi identification (Fahmi, 2020b). Figure 2a. Pope Francis’ controversy on LGBT’s civic status (generated by Astramaya SNA). [ 163 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 Figure 2b. Pope Francis’ controversy on LGBT’s civic status (Source: Instagram, 2020). Pope Francis’ controversy was initiated after a quotation from his biographical movie “Francesco” (2020) regarding his support of same-sex civil unions. However, it gave a different meaning of virality as Catholicism is among the minority groups in Indonesia. The SNA displayed a far less complicated interaction, and the volume is much smaller than other viral topics. Figure 2a shows the “islands” of conversations, disconnected from each other, with scattered accounts creating an outer ring nebula, suggesting the focus is more on the figure of the Pope and his “controversial” statement rather than the collectivity it may be triggered. It may indicate dispersed responses not belonging to the single coherence narrative. The debate revolved around the presumably non-Catholic Christians who criticized the Pope’s position. Some of them employed biblical verses to support their anti-LGBT standing. Nevertheless, a closer look through Instagram analytics gave a more complex religious talk. @xxxkatolik, a Catholic IG account, demonstrated the most significant volume (160 loves), which defended the Pope’s position that the Pope never annulled the Catholic doctrine of marriage between man and woman. The post only got [ 164 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 one response that merely shared the emoticon 🙏 that could be translated as a concurrence to the explanation. Our observation throughout some Catholic and Christian WhatsApp groups never displayed an excessive discussion on the issue, and it dissipated immediately in the coming few days. A study by Sunstein demonstrated that “people’s level of interest in the same news stories was greatly affected by the network label” (Sunstein, 2017, p. 65). An example of that, according to the research, American Republicans are more likely to be attracted by the reports of Fox Network than others such as CNN or NPR. At the same time, the Democrats are the other way around. Applying the same logic to the present analysis, socmed account, as a paradigmatic “TV network’s label,” might limit the netizens’ type of responses. Hence, the account @ xxxkatolik might assure the Catholic netizens to accept the clarification from the Indonesian Catholic church, thus suppressing further debate on the topic. However, the public, indicated by @vivacoid opening conversation, as the most significant volume of discussion (1014 loves and 325 comments) with tumultuous debate put forward by cross-confessional voices, but predominantly Muslim, displayed criticism to the Pope’s position and discussed within their respective religious doctrine of sexuality. Even more interesting is @dakwahxxx (501 loves and 62 comments), a da’wa Instagram account that concentrated on Islamic spiritual self-help, sometimes political, suddenly taking this issue into their lap. Unsurprisingly, the responses are almost unanimously negative, regardless of some minor voices that attempt to draw attention to the complex problems of LGBT (see Figure 2b). Interestingly, this position is shared by some non-Catholic Christian voices that support traditional Islamic places on LGBT. Ultimately, the seemingly unpretentious posting of @dakwahxxx, which held 570K Instagram followers, became the site of interreligious polemic and apologetics. Furthermore, through the tagline of the account to “Like [the posting] if you think it is beneficial. Comment if you want to share it with your friends. Share it if you want to enhance your religious act/virtue” (Like jika postingan ini bermanfaat. Komen jika ingin berbagi dengan teman. Share jika ingin menambah amalnya), demonstrated the nature of the religion of the hybrid media space, i.e., the convenient mobilization of religious aspiration mediatized by the digital technology: a religiosity at your fingertips. It may indicate the more significant concern in which the religious minority group tends to limit the confrontational situation they could not entirely control. At the same time, for the dominant voice represented by @dakwahxxx, such controversial issues might boost their religious agenda and strengthen their conservative view. [ 165 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 Hostility is prominent in viral messages, as displayed by Twitter’s SNA, through the formation of epistemic and homophilial bubbles. Still, we also testified to more balanced and hospitable messages that tried to moderate the polarity. It would be even more potent if those messages could gain the position of an information arbiter, i.e., the role of mediating between poles, which tended to be critical toward both sides but somewhat acceptable by all conflicting parties. The information arbiter could echo a social structure change if it could gain the highest betweenness centrality position, such as once enjoyed by the Twitter account Jack Separo Gendeng (@sudjiwotedjo) during the presidential campaign at the end of 2018 and early 2019. Such a situation does not so much appear in the religious conversation in the present observation, except in minor appearances such as indicated by Figure 2b. Figure 3. Controversy HRS vs. NM (Source: Drone Emprit Publications). The case of hostility between Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, renowned as Habib Rizieq (HRS), and Nikita Mirzani (NM) explained several things. First of all, the prominent context of the hybrid media space, where the offline rhetoric of HRS, posted on social media, responded by NM also in social media (Fig. 3). Secondly, NM, according to Fahmi Ismail, succeeded in “split the wave” of the revitalized pro-HRS grouping after his return from Saudi Arabia (Fahmi, 2020b). By splitting the wave, NM opened up a more extensive discussion of morality, law-abiding citizenship, and the possible regrouping of the anti-HRS discourse. But beyond that, we testified to the presence of the information arbiters in this controversy, enacted by several online media such as @ [ 166 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 CNNIndonesia, @detikcom, and @VIVAcoid. This might help us think again about the return of credible journalism as the fourth pillar of democracy. Nice words and calm posture do not necessarily reflect hospitality, though probably a “neutrality” at best. Hostility might be the religious or political terminology, while hospitality became a subversive force. In viral communication, it might be within the polarized interaction. An Islamic Twitter account @sxxxx posted a message as follows: “Fathimah [i.e., Fatima, the daughter of Prophet Muhammad], a direct descendant of Rasulullah [i.e., the Prophet Muhammad], did not enjoy an exception before the law. Anyone who claimed himself, Habib, should maintain himself and obey the law.” The hospitable message is an allusion toward HRS for his disobedience to the police summons. This is only one example that epitomized the critique of much Islamic leadership toward the questionable attitude of HRS in his conflict with NM that was associated with his “Habib” religious title. Derrida introduced the term hostipitality as an innate of hospitality. That is, hospitality is always on the verge of hostility in a contradictory and paradoxical manner. Welcoming the Other always opens the possibility of hostility as several interaction features are at work, such as temporality, the face of the Other, and so on. Contextualized this insight in dealing with instrumentalized communication, such a condition might be identified as “splitting the wave” of the surge of popularity of HRS after his return from Saudi Arabia. It is interestingly allowing for the establishment of new NM moral standing, e.g., netizens revealed the charity work of NM as a silent benefactor for the remote area’s honorary teachers (guru honorer). We may testify the hostipitality at work through which: (1) hospitality toward NM appeared as the counterbalance of the MRS’ new slogan of “morality revolution” (revolusi akhlaq); (2) hostility/hospitality appeared as a political language, transgression against the hegemonic power (by the pro-MRS in their critics toward the government); (3) Appeared as “recalcitrant” language that confrontational, blunt, and prone to the social polarization. The core of the theory of hospitality is the wager thrown by an agency in an encounter with the Other, the guest, and the stranger. Because hospitality presumed the reflective realm of interaction in which the self and the Other engaged (or “social dancing”) in well-set (stabilized) existential interaction that implicated the condition of wages and vulnerability. Hospitality and hostility are the effects of those conditions. Nevertheless, those insights seem to demand further elaboration as frameworks to understand such situations in the context of viral forms of communication. “Cultures are lived; the digital is programmed,” remarks Wiggins (Wiggins, 2019, p. 22), [ 167 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 heightened the condition of instrumentalized human interaction in the digital realm. Hospitality as a scale-free abstraction is challenging to obtain (cf. Candea, 2012). Such a wager loses its power in highly mediatized digital communication. The interaction among agencies is entirely translated through representational entities (socmed account, anonymity), complicating the reality of the Other. Epafras (Epafras, 2020, pp. 19–23) introduced the notion of “organic hospitality” to frame the dynamic in the context of hybrid media space. Organic hospitality is a more action-based and pragmatic mode of hospitality that is “innate” in the social network. CONCLUSION: BEYOND TRIUMPH AND TRANSGRESSION Admittedly, the value of hospitality in the traditional sense understood by average Indonesians is mostly sporadic and vulnerable to viral communication. The prominent challenge is the instrumental condition of communication that bares us from the evaluative power of such virtue: haters and saints dwelling on the same platform. Besides the beneficial and digital dividend, this communication platform is also a social space allowing for the mobilization of confrontational collective action, it is a fertile soil for religious polemic and promotion of conservatism, civil transgression, and deep distrust of the government, which inadvertently push the democratic agenda to the periphery. This confirms the decline of ideal public space that became a severe hindrance to digital democracy envisioned by some scholars (Deibert et al., 2012; Morozov, 2011). The effects of this condition are unfolding the digital paranoia, conspiracy theory formation, and the prevailing emotion over facts, thus heightening the state of a “post-truth” society (D’Ancona, 2017, pp. 61– 76; Tapsell, 2017b; but see the critique of Harari, 2018, pp. 338–356). In short, hostility is reigning the day. The expression of hospitality appears through the presence of the “third voice” and “information arbiter.” The clarity of the message transferred became the new “morality”; hence, hospitality appeared as the “truthful message” exchanged, channeled, and curated by the information arbiter. Often, the arbiters are online media. Regarding the controversy between MRS and NM, the arbiters are @CNNIndonesia, @detikcom, and @vivacoid. Though indeed, it does not mean they maintain “neutrality” at all costs, as behind it, there is regulation on mass media, and further, social, commercial, and political interest of such mass media accounts, a reflection of the condition of hybrid media space, which convergence of capital and news outlets conflated (Tapsell, 2017a). The pandemic does not remove the “recurrence” of the former polarity. It is [ 168 ] AL ALBAB: Volume 12 Number 2 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v12i2.2745 the same “obsessive-compulsive,” reflexive and monitorial posture fostered long before the pandemic, through which panoptical power, sometimes an obsession to respond to specific conditions related to one’s social, political, and religious concern, even to the point of invading other group’s or individual’s space (Epafras et al., 2019, p. 222). Hospitable words might be critically assessed as genuine with the possibility of double talk, ambiguous, and part of weaponized information. Socmed has been the tool and medium for humanitarian purposes, framed within religious and non-religious language. A virality produced hospitality in generic terms, “organic” hospitality over the story of suffering, victimhood, religious conversion, and romance. Those might be a social commentary and projection of economic inequality, interreligious tension, transactional human relationships, religious conservatism, and other social challenges. Regrettably, the investigation demonstrated different levels of hostility over limited hospitality. Those contribute to creating a conflicting arena, through which the polarization of public talks gives an impression of the dispute between “conservative” religious positions against the “progressive” voices. Aporia, in Derrida’s construction, which allows for the possibility of rupture to the more transformative relationship, turned out to be a process of rebound, moving back to the self, creating a hostile to the Other. Hospitality and hostility appeared in polarized manners, in which the possibility of hospitality mainly was in the form of the ephemeral position of an information arbiter. 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