Chaste Relations in Cyber Life; a Phenomenological Approach

Islamic Iran's encounter with modern communication technologies, especially the internet and cyberspace, has created a new situation in religious people's lives and a lack of media literacy and rational action can cause a lot of challenges in both individual and collective ethics. This article brings a theoretical analysis of cyber life by relying on the concept of chaste relations and discusses how ethical values, especially chaste relations, are expressed in the internet users' activities. To this end, we have formulated chaste cyber relations with a phenomenological method of understanding the religious people's life experience. The research results show that among key elements of the formation of chaste relations in cyber life one can refer to personal characteristics, commitment to religion, cyber literacy and chastity, virtual identity, and selecting one’s virtual acquaintances. Hence, reaching a typology of users in four groups: well-aware religious person, simple religious person, unscrupulous religious person and liberal user. Besides, in the relation between the ethical- jurisprudential teachings about chastity and the essential issues in users’ typology, we reached a conceptual model of chaste relation in cyber life and some practical suggestions about achieving that.