fishers, surfers and casters

My awesome friend Heidi Campbell has scored a pocket of money from Texas A&M University to seed a Virtual Centre for Research into New Media, Religion and Digital Culture. She’s looking around for people who may have any ideas, opinions or resources to share. If you’re one of those people, check out the Facebook page and contact her there.

The Media and Religion Research Fellowship Project page is now live here. Click for a goofy photo of me, as well as finding out what fantastic work these guys have done.

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.

Any comment on what Web 2.0 can do for churches?
I think I’m out of comments, does anyone else have any?