Last week in class I presented a short critique of Heidi Campbell's "Understanding the Relationship between Religion Online and Offline in a Networked Society." My assignment this week was to answer one of the questions posed by my classmates.
Q: Can you elaborate more on how online religion practice can help with the religion practice as a whole?
Q: Do you think people generally act differently on different platforms, especially in the way they express their religions?
A: One of the traits of "networked religion" that Campbell observed, "convergent practice," speaks in particular to the first question. I hope a brief discussion of this trait "in action" can also serve as an illustration that offers an answer to the first question.
By convergent practice, Campbell means that traditional rituals and interactions get "adapted" to online culture, and often "blended" with each other to form a sort of remix that is influenced by the original context(s) of the practice, the new online context, and the particular focus of the person(s) doing the adapting.
An example of this phenomenon might be the Prayers of the People project. This project was inspired by a (very) old ritual, the offering of a variety of types of prayer "for the church and for the world" during a particular moment in the church service. A group of monks in Cambridge, MA is trying to help their network of friends, supporters, and spiritual explorers bring that prayerful mentality into their everyday lives via a shared social media prayer practice.
Participants in this project can sign up to receive a daily email prompting them to pray according to the "type" of prayer they have designed for the day (thanksgiving, praise, penitence, etc.). The Brothers always give an example, as well as a "call to action" that invites participants to share their prayer on social media using the #prayersof hashtag.
That hashtag, of course, allows the Brothers to "curate" these prayers and share especially powerful ones with their community—people who are participating in this project and people who aren't.
Against that backdrop, I think we can see an outline of an answer to this question.God of forgiveness, we're sorry for those times our church hasn't been a model of your love. #prayersof #penitence https://t.co/oQFbogr4qi— Anglican Diocese TO (@anglicandioTO) October 25, 2016
On the one hand, clearly the affordances of a particular platform help to shape the prayers people offer, and probably also how they interact with the prayers of others.
For instance, if a prayer I'm sharing can be captured in some sense visually, I'm more likely to share it on Instagram:
Others seem to fit in better on Twitter:
Being able to add video greatly expands the conception of what it might mean to pray as an online practice. For instance, here it helps to incorporate the (again ancient) idea that embodiment is important to prayer—that prayer is more than just words.God of compassion look upon those whose ❤️ are 💔 in the hopeless corners of the 🌍🌏🌎. Be our love, our vision. #gc78 #prayersof #intercession— VILE 🐺HOWL-iver (@kmoliver) June 29, 2015
On the other hand, there is "nothing new under the sun," and I think we see in these practices something utterly ordinary and perfectly consistent with the ways people have practiced religion for millennia.
People of faith want to bring their beliefs into conversation with their everyday lives—their hopes and dreams, their regrets, the challenges they face, the people and places that bring them joy. They want to gives some kind of "voice" to that intersection. And they often want to share it with their faith community and with the world.
In this (phenomenological?) sense, I don't think people are acting differently at all. But they are (to get back to that second question) using digital social practices to deepen their experience of faith and of both virtual and physical community.
No comments:
Post a Comment