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.

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

What can the Anglican church learn from emerging churches and their online habits?
Mmm, I can think of a few things, but I don’t want to make it look like the emerging church is doing everything right and nothing wrong, and the Anglican church doesn’t have anything to teach the rest of us. I also don’t want it to look like every part of the emerging church is doing it the same way. These are my opinions, which come from what I’ve seen and read and heard, but should be received as the opinions of some guy, not as the opinions of someone in any privileged position.

What can the Anglican church learn from emerging churches’ online behaviour?
1. That emerging church people don’t use the new media for world domination.
2. That they use them to listen as much as they use it to speak.
3. That they are more interested in sharing information for use on offline contexts, rather than ensuring that the online connection is the be all and end all.
4. That they create online facades that are deeply personal, rather than organisational. I.e. pages and profiles are more about people than they are about groups.
5. That they expect dissent, treat it as a way to help them grow rather than a threat to survival.
6. That they appreciate that a conversation is as good as a conversion, as they accept they are in need of ongoing conversion.

2. What are young people doing with their religious identity?
Wow, that’s just like saying, “So, tell me about the universe.”

A quick answer would be that young people are living their lives with it. But I wonder if the question actually was meant to be, “How are young people becoming religious?”, or something like that.

Safe things to say:
1. That young people are less likely to align their religious identity with a local church, group, para-church body, organisation, denomination or institution than previous generations.
2. That even regular young church-goers would get more information about how to be religious from sources outside the church than within it. Friends, movies, TV, magazines, all that stuff.
3. That this shift away from organised religion is also true in other spheres of life. Young people are also less likely to align themselves with a political party, a civil action group (I know Greenpeace wonders where all the activists have gone), a volunteer organisation than past generations.
4. That this doesn’t mean young people are less political, activated, even religious. It just means their choice of expressing these parts of their identity is different.

Difficult things to say:
1. That denominational expressions of Christianity are on their way out for good.
2. Aberystwyth.
3. That this is not just a trend, a slow social change. This is an ideological shift that is due in part to the mistakes made by institutional churches, which they(we) need to address. The spiritual abuse of young people is an important one, though by no means the only one.