fishers, surfers and casters

I’ve been re-reading Manuel Castells’ The Internet Galaxy and it’s brought up ideas and concerns about how we think about religious community online. Early research on religion online has considered questions about what it is, what it does, its costs and benefits in comparison to participation in offline communities. These questions, among those of researchers in other areas of online society, have followed moral panics about the decrease in sociability and the effects on the mental and physical health of people who spend time on the Internet. Studies have focussed on online settings such as email groups, chat rooms and MUDs where the boundaries of the community are made explicit by the technology. That is, in these environments a communicative space is easily identified, either by the web page hosting the chat room, or the label in the subject line of the email.

The blogosphere presents a need to rethink the conceptualisation of community for both religion and research purposes. It is hardly a bounded community. While those involved in conversation through posts and comments on one blog may see the limits of the communicative space in the one web page, however bloggers are connected with other bloggers who are connected again with others in a way that the limits of communication cannot be drawn. Network is a better word to describe the constellation of connections that bloggers and readers navigate through the blogosphere.

Moreover, Castells suggests that the idea of community in the offline world, as a point of comparison with online community, may be idealised beyond the reality. Modern Western life, for the author, has seen the rise of personal relationships outside families and embedded communities (schools, churches, sporting groups, workplaces) as a dominant pattern of sociability, to the embodiment of “me-centered networks”.

It represents the privatization of sociability. This individualized relationship to society is a specific pattern of sociability, not a psychological attribute. It is rooted, first of all, in the individualization of the relationship between capital and labor, between workers and the work process, in the network enterprise. It is induced by the crisis of patriarchalism, and the subsequent disintegration of the traditional nuclear family, as constituted in the late nineteenth century. It is sustained (but not produced) by the new patterns of urbanization, as suburban and exurban sprawl, and the de-linking between function and meaning in the micro-places of megacities, individualize and fragment the spatial context of livelihood. And it is rationalized by the crisis of political legitimacy, as the growing distance between citizens and the states stressed the mechanisms of representation, and fosters individual withdrawal from the public sphere. The new pattern of sociability in our societies is characterized by networked individualism. (pp. 128-129)

Castells blames not the Internet on the rise of networked individualism, but sees that this pattern of sociability works best online, as it "provides an appropriate material support for the diffusion of networked individualism as the dominant form of sociability” (p. 131).

Castells’ idea suggests the idealisation of community in a formal religious context. Especially for post-Vatican II Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism, the congregation is highly prized as a sacrament, the face of Christ’s presence on earth, the starting point and destination of the church’s mission. But in a late modern society the congregation cannot singularly represent the religious identity and practice of its members, but can only be a node in the network of everyday living that informs those things.

So in these times perhaps “community” is not a description of what is, but of the ideals that either attract or repel people from engagement in religious activity. Community is a construct. The blogosphere is a place where religious people not only construct community online through their interactions, but engage in the practice of discursively reconstructing religious community as a whole.

Got this emailed to me today, if anyone’s interested:

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTER PROPOSALS

Network Apocalypse: Visions of the End in an Age of Internet Media

This edited collection of work by international scholars would document how Internet communication is creating, adapting, and recreating beliefs about an imminent mass transformation resulting in the end of human history. How are ancient prophetic beliefs faring in our everyday lives as they have become technologized by network communication? How do religious communities sharing these beliefs use the Internet? Are everyday religious believers empowered or disempowered by Internet technologies? Are gender, ethic, and racial divisions being broken down or reinforced? How are text-based prophetic traditions adapting to the more dynamic and fluid understanding of the Word in our digital age?

The answers to these questions are important for scholars from a wide range of disciplines working on questions about how the Internet is changing some of our most powerful and recurring religious beliefs.

Each chapter of this book will focus on a specific sample of discourse that features apocalyptic beliefs. Comparative and theoretical chapters are also welcomed. Methods may be quantitative, qualitative, or a combination of both.

Chapter topics might include by are not limited to:

• Christian, Islamic, Jewish, or other traditional apocalyptic expression online;
• specific apocalyptic groups using the Internet;
• online prophecy and/or prayer practices;
• apocalyptic games, gamers, or gaming;
• apocalyptic expression in virtual worlds;
• apocalyptic communication via mobile communication technologies;
• new apocalyptic religious movements using the Internet;
• apocalyptic ideas or discourses that rely on theories of technology including concepts of “Gaia-mind,” “singularity,” and etc.

Email Rob Howard – rgh AT rghoward DOT com – if you’re interested. You’ll need to provide a preliminary title for your chapter, a 250-word (max) abstract and a CV.

Prayers and tears to the people of L’Aquila. I have fond memories of your beautiful city and her friendly, open and hospitable people.

Earthquake.

A couple of posts back I talked about the quest for authenticity in religious identity for emerging church bloggers, in an online environment where old etiquette rules have been removed, yet where new ones are surfacing. One of the most obvious communicative practices I have come across in my study of emerging church bloggers is what I call “the downplay”.

In line with stereotypes of the larger emerging church movement, bloggers I’ve studies are nearly all professional/student and have some degree of university education. Most have a theological qualification and some formal ministry training. Yet bloggers devalue their own training and education in conversations (though not those of others) to the point of self-deprecation. They do it a variety of ways:

1. Labelling their own opinions and propositions in posts and comments as “rants”, “random thoughts” or “musings”. These labels also appear as the titles of categories and tags, and titles or in subtitles of blogs themselves.

2. Using words and expressions such as “IMHO” (in my honest/humble opinion), “Not that I’m an expert but”, “I reckon” and “Just what I’m thinking about at the moment”.

3. If they do make a claim to some knowledge or expertise about a subject, it is based on claims of experience in church life or ministry, rather than education.

I think this etiquette practice represents two ideological stances. It firstly stands for the emerging church’s distaste for hierarchy. Though emerging church bloggers do not deny the benefits of good theological training, or are less than grateful for the opportunity to enter higher study, they do not want to set themselves apart from those without it. Secondly, it shows an interest in the private over the public. While posts and conversations may be centred around public issues, and bloggers recognise a public audience, they prefer a personal perspective. For them, any reference to qualifications represents a formal and public image, that masks a more private or inner perspective.

Update: As Rob mentioned in his comment below, emerging church bloggers are not the only bloggers who recognise this etiquette. Before Facebook and Myspace, blogs were a popular social networking tool for teenagers, and Bortree (2005) has noted in her study of such bloggers that ingratiation to others in teenagers’ network involved some suppplication, including downplaying their “coolness” in comparison to other people. Among these bloggers it was cool to think you weren’t cool.