Lecture given to STETS ordinands, Presentation Day, 22 November 2014
Overview
Don’t want to make assumptions. Get a feel for where we’re at. How many online etc.? Telephone (landline but leave vague). TV. Computer. Mobile. Smartphone? Percentages.
(In UK in 2006, 16m accessed the Internet every day; in 2013 it was 36m (73%).)
Digital divide: income, geography, and age, but not going to talk about this,. Nor about privacy but obviously hugely important and pertinent to all three, esp. marriages and funerals.
Social Network (since 1930s academic ref) > Internet > Broadband > Mobiles (always on, everywhere) (% using mobile to access Internet every day: in 2010, 24%; in 2013 53% – ONS)
Digital Age: trend setters, early up-takers, main uptake etc.. cf Bill Dutton’s work.
Main shift since mid-noughties – Web 2.0 (marketing?), participatory. 93% of 16-24yr olds use Soc Med every day. 1 in 2 of every adult 45-54 as well!
What matters is twofold. For those who do it, their experience and how it shapes and is shaped by the technology. In addition, and this applies for those who don’t use it, it’s shaping the narrative of our day: ‘the internet is receding into the narrative’ Robin Mansell (see http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NrBl2Jvb4VA& ).
Desire for choice and customisation exist within broader worldview (late capitalism), which in part is shaped by and is shaping the new media. Participation & choice of networks as a way of customising identity.!
This is all only 25 years old (comparison with effects of printing press in 15 century (at all levels of society). How many years ahead in ministry? This is the key change in terms of context for their ministries.
2 dangers – according all this too much importance, and according it too little. I think the latter is more likely.
Invited to talk about Social Media and the Occasional Offices in the spring to the Winchester curates.
Social Media as subset of the Digital Age, Occasional Offices as subset of church’s overall ministry.
Aware that these curates really hadn’t thought much about this as a key shaper of the context of the current and future ministries. So rather than wait till you’re already out there, in part what I’m trying to do today is to get this on your mental map.
A danger in this kind of reflection is that you end up becoming too high level – ‘ the Digital Age’, ’the Internet’, ‘the church’ etc.. Good to bring it down a little, to be a bit more concrete. Occasional offices – bread and butter of ministry.
Identity and Baptism!
Context & Theological Reflections!
- As more and more of our lives are mediate via these computer networked devices, as are using soc med, creating our identities byte by byte in conjunction with others – relationality
- this creating is not separate, it interweaves our everyday existence (esp. because of mobiles) – note the big change over the last few years – on to next point:
- so convergence of offline and online – increasingly an old-fashioned way of looking at it – cyberspace, who really talks about that nowadays?
- participatory, creative, anti-authority (because of the medium) – you, along with anyone else, can post to YouTube, Tweet, FB, Pin, Instagram etc. You can contact the person directly without going through their PA. A flattening of the hierarchies. The speed with which a good idea (and also lies and untruths (see Rowan in Tablet recently) can spread. This impacts Authority – map briefly the change from utopian participation to institutional adoption, where the big players are leveraging the technology, with varying results.
- Your identity in part shaped by which platform you use arty fashions Tumblr, media Tweeters, youthful YouTuber – fracturing of social media market now that your grandparents are on Facebook (remember mySpace?!). Snapchat (where the content is deleted shortly afterwards – ephemeral (up to 10 secs (but that doesn’t stop the screenshot – sends a notice when possible))), WhatsApp , WeChat, Keek (video) KiK (IM) etc. Big convergence in terms of what they’re all offering. Weibo, too (Chinese community in the UK as well as overseas).
- Which platform for which relationships (YouTube & Twitter go together)
- But one of the key things is that we are no longer defined by the town your growing up in etc..You can create/join networks of like-minded people all around the world, whatever it may be.
- We get to choose who we identify with (and who co-creates our online identity) and we’re ableto be in contact with a much larger number of people – liberation.
- Constructing identity or perforative identity (cf Judith Butler)
- Multiple networks – weaker networks (Gianni Vattimo & Weak Thought if time). Reducing thestrength of traditional ties, family, religious, geographical.
- Connected Individualism – me, looking at my screen (Bowling alone – Robert Putnam)
- Postcard example – do we still send them? one to one (Christmas cards – for how long?)
- Increased demand for customisation and personalisation
- It’s all so time consuming?
- Overload/excess of possible, meaningful relationships – what’s driving this? Baptism as acceptance & calling.
- Deliberate acts – difference between serve and rally
- Weakening of ties -> sentimental emotions. Constant flow. Superficial, self-aware
- Strong emphasis on being entertaining – room for seriousness?
- Increase in customisation in advertising as your online behaviour is tracked.
- imago Dei – relationality at our core when God is understood as Triune, but with the mediatedperson (personare – mask/icon!), self-constructing contra Butler.
- I am creating my own identity – I am my own saviour (idolatry). I am in control (not!).
- All this contrasts completely with what is happening at baptism. A new identity in Christ – issueof agency. Who gives us our new identity? In baptism we are given our new identity by God. Christ is the minister of the sacrament (Schillebeeckx (Belgium RC theologian – link to John Macquarrie’s A Guide to the Sacraments))
- All this is taking a huge amount of time and effort. Little room for gaps. For silence. Interior silence For hearing God. Every moment is to be filled with this digital noise requiring huge ongoing effort.
If time…!
Weave in negotiating boundaries? Both within identities and beyond within group identities.
How do we stop church become being just another identity (within the plurality of our own identities which constitute us). So you have your church network?
Issues of authenticity.
Hermeneutics, hermeneutics, hermeneutics. Context is everything. This is the Age of Interpretation (Vattimo again).
Weakening. Kenosis. Incarnation…
The public face of the church in the media increasingly being shaped by media endorsed (eyeballs/ page views) producers rather than necessarily formally trained/officially authorised … Eyeballs count because these people have got to make a living and if they’re doing it this way they need the traffic (to get a book deal, speaking at conference, advertising etc.)
Digital tattoos. So hard to move on from old identity. Integrity and authenticity both play out synchronically and diachronically (God’s eye view of one’s life (at least up till this point)). Our past can come to haunt us (Google used to research and weed out applicants – how many of us google someone before we’re going to meet them) [EU right to forgotten? or censorship]. Our identity is increasingly what we have been throughout all of our lives, not just the one we present (present/ presence?). Think of how Lizzy Grant ‘became’ Lana del Rey. But Lizzy Grant doesn’t ‘disappear’ in the new narrative but is still there online (YouTube etc.). This kind of identity footprint used to be only the preserve of the rich and famous (and was even then negotiated between journalists, editors, the rich, famous and powerful) but now we’re all (almost all (with the exception of the digitally excluded!)) leaving the same kind of marks of our past.
Key theological angle is of course grace and forgiveness. Society singularly ill-equipped to shape people who can offer it in our time. Alasdair MacIntyre’s call for new Benedictine communities inAfter Virtue. Which brings one to one of MacIntyre’s key exponents:
Where do you learn how to be a Christian? If the church is the space (online and off) where we learn to speak Christian (as Hauerwas recently put it), who are our role models in the faith and on what basis (given the brand/marketing etc. that’s so prevalent online and off (church as brand)) do we choose (even fall into this as being an issue of choice and finding out) a type of Christianity that ‘fits’ me and how is this actually different from the broader issue of finding the truth that suits me (weakening, again)), meets my needs – see the shift – it’s back to being all about me. Bring back to baptism as being, in the first part, to do with the death of my identity.
As usual, pneumatology is the weakest doctrine in all of the current reflections. Guiding us into all truth…? [This also ties in with what Anne-Claar was referring to when she mentioned that the spiritual gifts God gives our the people.]
Give fun examples of how S is learning to apply make-up via YouTube tutorials (not her mother or her friends). How J is learning how to play Minecraft – Stampy Cat! How I learned to connect looms for J’s loom bands from watching a 5 year old’s YT vid!
Questions
• Recent training – missio Dei. Importance of contextualisation. For many this will all feel like a foreign land. But for those who are ‘native’, the danger is also there that they can’t see their own
cultural goggles. How to achieve this without giving in to kitsch (sentimentalism) on the one hand and retreating into aesthetic snobbery on the other? In a context of pressure of waning numbers (20% in 2000, 12% in 2010). Got to be ‘relevant’ etc..
- How to convey the identity that is being given, one which transcends and undergirds and reframes all our other identities?
- Baptised into the church, a network of people whom we did not choose (just think of the tensions revealed in Paul’s correspondence with the church in Corinth). Questions of quite how this is actually the case given the homogeneity that often occurs in church. How to convey this importance of there being a physically gathered community through which the Spirit shapes us when that is less and less a feature in terms of everyday life (so less and less important for those who know no other ‘way’ – ah there’s the word!) – people expecting ad hoc meet ups, impromptu / and for a baptismal congregation who are often not part of the regular worshipping community – actually in many ways, it’s quite characteristic of contemporary gatherings – one-off. But the long- term formation is not something people are generally interested in – least of Christians who frequently up sticks when they don’t like the new vicar, music etc., all the while seeking out a church that matches their chosen/constructed/performed identity.
- social media – drive to informality. They’re not stuffy. Tone and voice is all informal. Abbreviation, wit, succinct in. Solemnity out (for the most part, we’ll come back to that). Limitation of 140 characters and constantly distracted – diminished attention spans – or rather multiple things at once.
- Large criss-crossing networks attending the service. Involvement in the case of infant baptism in the story of the child (right up to confirmation and beyond). Same for adult? How to do this?
- Commodification under-pinning the parents’ desire for a unique service? (as in weddings) How!do parents react when it’s a group baptism as opposed to adults being baptised together?!
Questions on the hand out:
- What are your experiences of social media? Do you find it affecting your everyday life positively and/or negatively?
- How do you stay in touch with your family, friends and acquaintances these days? Has this changed much over the last 15 years.
- How can we teach and make connections to the concepts of ‘belonging’ and ‘commitment’ in the light of changes in the way we communicate and relate to one another using social media?
- How do we help each other learn to be Christians/speak Christian in this digital age given the pressures to find the Christianity that works for ‘me’ – true for all of us?
- How do we cultivate authenticity in our online and offline identity amidst multiple interweaving networks?
- Does this feel like a foreign country? Contextualisation.
Extra – Presence
[I jumped to include this in the talk because it’s just so useful. It comes from part of the subsequent talk on Unity/Difference and Weddings.]
• To help us get a handle on all of this, the idea of Connected Presence/Absent Presence/Present Absence/Present Presence (Scott Campbell and Yong Jin Park, communication scientists, for Connected Presence. Kenneth Gergen – social psychologist – on absent presence: you’re here but your focus is elsewhere. Present absence are Lee Rainie, Barry Wellman from MIT: you’re elsewhere but you’re here with us. And then there’s Present Presence (me!) and also Absent Absence (also me), but come to this if time/useful under Funerals. In that talk I then proceed to explore this using some of Martin Buber’s reflections (I-thou, I-it). In addition I explore more what we mean by presence (key theological term, esp for ministry – ministry of presence in a digital age…?) and then deconstruct presence (not with negative intent but to explore its inherent alterity and futurity and therein find echoes of ‘I am who I am’ being variously translated as ‘I will be who I will be’ and (cf Richard Kearney) ‘I may be who I may be’) as it’s a important term that’s used too easily without our being precise as to what we actually and variously mean by it.
Reading
Sadly, there’s not really one key book yet on all this that provides a satisfactory theological overview. But that’s to be expected really given that it’s still a very new field of study in a rapidly changing context (esp. given the time the publication process takes).
Introduction to key ‘internet’ issues (but with hardly a nod to religion whatsoever!):
M. Graham & W. H. Dutton (Eds) (2014). Society & The Internet Oxford: OUP.
Some theory focussing on religion and digital age but mainly journal articles gathered together in one place (so a broad range including Hinduism, Ultra-Orthodox Jews etc.):
H. A. Campbell, (Ed) (2013). Digital Religion London: Routledge!
P Hope Cheong, P. Fischer-Nielsen, S. Gelfgren, C. Ess (Eds) (2012) Digital Religion, Social Media and Culture Oxford: Peter Lang
Theory & Concept:
L. Rainie, B. Wellman (2012) Networked The New Social Operating System Cambrige: The MIT Press (useful for considering the connected presence stuff – but rather erring on the over-optimistic side of things)
C. Fuchs (2014) Social Media London: Sage (Marxist analysis – refreshing change to the uncritical view of the medium being value neutral)!
What else?
For those who are interested, much of what I’m saying results from conversations in my head as I engage with the books I’ve just listed, my own experience of working in this field from a commercial perspective, and a whole host of other writers who I’m familiar with from the last 20 years or thereabouts. It’s quite a rattle bag as you’ll see and there’s a lot disagreement but some surprising convergences, too! So some of the other voices who have left traces in the above include the following (check them out on Amazon, Youtube etc. if you get the chance):!
Gianni Vattimo, John Caputo, Slavoj Zizek, Richard Kearney, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, Jürgen Moltmann, John Macquarrie, F. LeRon Shults, Diana Eck, Catherine Keller, Roger Scruton, Martin Buber & John Webster.