Mon 25 Sep 2006
A couple of thoughts that have arisen after the last meeting with my supervisor, regarding blogging and religious community:
A number of blogs I’m watching closely have a set audience who post comments to the blogs regularly. Some comment on every post by the blog author. A blog community could be defined by the relationships between a blogger and his/her audience, as well as the relationships between members of the audience as they respond to each other’s comments. To what extent are these communities accidental (a group of people looking for something that just happen to find each other) or intentional (a group of people fully aware of their reason for being together)?
Why bother with the question?
It’s a matter of the quality of relationships, I think. The extent to which a blogger is fully aware of his/her audience (being made aware by the regular conversations that ensue through the comment threads) impacts on the conversations that blogger leads and moderates. As the social capital builds in each blog page, the blogger becomes more aware of the community that is being built. The accidental community that the blogger has found among his/her audience becomes more intentional.
How long will it take for a blog site to turn from a group of comments from random passers-by, to a group of people who know who they are talking to and what they’ll expect from each other? And how powerful is the blogger to make that transition happen?
We are all surfers, or swimmers, on this great lake called the WWW. Are bloggers fishing us out and drawing us into intentional community? Is that the bloggers’ purpose? Or is it the other way round, the blogger being the lost swimmer looking for someone out there to be his/her companion?
How is this different from local church communities? Australian religious history tells me that it is the institutional church that steps into a community, builds a church and calls people into it, like a fisher into a pond. However the rise of the “emerging church” would suggest the other way, a group of people wanting something different that what the institutional church has offered, and managing to find others wanting the same difference, like lost swimmers finding each other.
September 26th, 2006 at 07:10
Paul, I seem to remember that Pete Ward in his book “Liquid Church” has some stuff at the end about churches building communities/networks using TXT-ing that might intersect with this.
It’s a good question and one that raises questions about the inclusivity/exclusivity of existing and new blogging communities.
Tim also has some thoughts about comments here that might be relevant.
http://www.bigbible.org/blog/2005/11/web-2.htm
September 26th, 2006 at 18:31
Hey Stephen,
Thanks for the heads up. I’ve meaning to get myself a copy of that book.
I’m also very glad you understood what I was saying; I was afraid it wouldn’t make any sense. I had been writing late at night. But, then, again, you are very smart.
September 26th, 2006 at 18:41
Tim’s article reminds me of what Putnam describes as the difference between bridging and bonding social capital. Bonding social capital is exclusive, it accepts communciations in relationships that adhere to the set rules of the situation. Bridging social capital is more inclusive, and allows for a variety of opinions and values, and even discordance, within relationships.
The moderation power that blog technology gives the blogger clearly give them the authority to decide on the nature of their inclusivity or their exclusivity. It appears that most emerging church bloggers try fairly hard to bridge relationships between people of differing points of view. There is much in the blogs that I’ve read to say that most bloggers hate it when their comments on other blogs are deleted, just because they would disagree with the blogger. Yet all bloggers have some rules of moderation, which suggest their intent to bond people to some overarching rules of engagement, that reflect an emerging church ethos - create an emerging church ethos.