Heidi Campbells Notion of Religious Online Community - Essay Example

Heidi Campbell’s Notion of Religious Online Community Community refers a large social unit that shares common practices and values. Heidi Campbell describes it as the extent to which people meet and interact, be it physically or remotely (Campbell, 2010). It is usually larger than a village, and could also encompass a social unit larger than an ethnic group or even a country. That is why there exists what is usually called the International Community. The uniting factor of a community, according to Campbell, is majorly its values and practices (Hafner 35). This means that people could be living in the same geographical area but since they do not share the same values, they are not deemed as community. The conventional community is that which lives together physically and shares their values and practices within a locality. The contemporary community does not have to be living in the same locality since they could practice their values on a remote platform, which is online. Campbell describes the contemporary community, or community online, as that social unit that interacts online aided by the use of the internet (Campbell, 2010). He traces the emergence of the community online back to the early 1970s when the email first emerged. Emails were first powered by the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, commonly abbreviated as ARPANET, which was also the first operational packet switching network in the world (Brasher 25). The online space was, at first, purely a research space and not for social interactions’ use. Soon ARPANET created the first electronic discussion group establishing a moderated space to oversee various aspects of network business and research. Researchers within these messaging groups began forming unofficial groups such as SF-Lovers, created by some researchers to discuss science fiction. This and other early groups pioneered the social community online. Several special interest groups started emerging thereafter and this liberalization saw the birth of the “net.religion” debating group where religious opinions were aired. Further debates saw the narrowing down of this group to specific religious online forums, the first of which to emerge being “net.religion.jewish”. Newer advents of technology saw the creation of both newer and more precise forums and also better and faster ways of furthering these religious debates such as bulletin board systems (BBS), multi-user object oriented (MOO), multi-user dimension (MUD), and internet relay chat (IRC) rooms. Through standardization, regulation and setting of “rules of engagement” within the various forums, these computer-supported groups automatically qualified as communities, or more precisely, virtual communities. Campbell concurs with a definition, of virtual community, by Rheingold, that virtual communities are social aggregations emerging from internet forums when enough people carry on discussions with human feeling to form networks of personal relationships online. The evolution of Christian community online did not stop at the web groups and discussion forums for specific religions, in the mid – 1990s, cyber-churches and cyber-temples emerged as websites exclusively providing online worship services to their respective target groups (Stower, 2001). The argument behind this unique move was that the internet provides a forum for revolution, similar to the protestant wave, to reform and reinvent the ways in which faith and values are practiced and people communicate with each other and with God. The understanding was that people do not have to physically meet to practice their religious values and that computer networks provide social networks within which people can meet face-to-face, but virtually, within the computer network (Dawson 15). The study of religious community online critically began in early 1990s when scholars started paying attention more attention to issues of technology being used to congregate online, the types of discussions and practices. Two researchers, Hojsgaard and Warburg investigated the earlier studies on religious community online and categorised the issues covered into three aspects which included the descriptive aspect, critical aspect and theoretical aspect (Hojsjaad and Warburg 277). The descriptive aspect encompassed the documenting and describing the community formation. A walkthrough of initial studies show that they were highly descriptive, almost similar to the computer-mediated communications (CMC) research. Earlier researchers had basically concentrated on answering questions like “What is happening online?”, and how these interactions qualify as communities, and what impact joining an online community might have on an individual’s identity (Meyer, 2006). The second aspect of religious community online studies is the critical aspect or the critical analysis of the effects of the internet relationships. These studies emerged in the late 1990s where focus was more onto exploration of the transformative nature of online relationships. These studies focused more on what kind of a community an online community was and how it was reshaping the definition of community. It emerged that although there were different types of online communities, they all had some aspects in common; value traits and characteristics. Issues of credibility also emerged with more offline religious practitioners expressing their fear that these online communities were unauthentic, deceptive, impoverished or were forms of scum meant to attract more people and tuck them away from the real offline community. The third aspect of online religion study is the theoretical turn towards the relationship between the online and offline communities. This aspect is useful in setting up theoretical frameworks on which future studies on the effects of online relationships on offline relationships. Although online and offline relationships exhibit huge differences in their literal applications, studies have revealed that people often apply their offline community patterns in their online community relationships. It is clear that offline and online community are remotely related as one’s conduct in the online community is largely determined by his values in the offline community. A key emerging issue in the theoretical aspect of religious study is the effect of the online community in the shaping of the future social trends of the offline community. In conclusion, it is true to say that humans build their relationships in networked communities, whether online or offline. Although it may seem like there exists a big difference between the offline and online communities, their modes of operation are exactly the same since they are based on shared values. Researchers have evidenced this fact by bringing out the existing similarities between the computer network and the social network. With continued use of the internet, there are notable shifts and changing notions of the nature of online community in the contemporary society. The online community tends to reassure themselves that theirs is a more inclusive approach to religious practice that the contemporary face-to-face religious interactions. There is no doubting that the future of online religion will realize greater interaction of the online community at even more sophisticated levels. This is evidenced by the trends that have been seen in the past, from as early as 1920s when the radio was invented, to the 1940s when the television came and to the 1970s when the internet came into existence, practising of religion always taken up the use of such technology. Works Cited Brasher, Brenda E. Give me that online religion. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. Print. Campbell, Heidi. When religion meets new media. London: Routledge, 2010. Print. Dawson, Lorne L., and Douglas E. Cowan. Religion online: finding faith on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. http://www.academia.edu/301681/When_Religion_Meets_New_Media Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where wizards stay up late: the origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print. ftp://ftp.fixme.ch/free_for_all/Ebook/IT%20eBooks/Entertainment/Fiction/Origins%20of%20the%20Internet,%20Where%20the%20Wizards%20Stay%20Up%20Late.pdf Hojsgaard, Morten T., and Margit Warburg. Religion and cyberspace. London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Meyer, Birgit. Religion, media, and the public sphere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Print. Stover, Mark. Theological librarians and the Internet: implications for practice. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Information Press, 2001. Print. Read More