Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Creating, Redeeming, and Sustaining S2S Communications - #eform16 @shamikalashawn @padrealberto @sspellers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/07/2016 - 03:46Yesterday, during brief breaks from my work in social media at a Federally Qualified Health Center in Connecticut, I found moments to step into the social media stream flowing out of the eFormation conference at Virginia Theological Seminary.
I had thought about going to this conference. It seems right up my alley as a social media professional seeking to proclaim God’s love in new ways. I thought of the great Missional Voices conference I had attended a month or two ago at VTS. But the price of the conference was too much for me, and I’ve often been disappointed with social media conferences.
I understand why people charge for things. We need to make our ministries sustainable. So, I thought about what sustains me. I understand the role of money in our society, in needing to pay for food and housing, but when I think about what really sustains us, the Sustainer, and that “all good gifts around us, are sent from heaven above”, I rethought what sustainable ministries really means. I sometimes think that the gift economy and paying it forward are some of the best expressions of grace we see today, expressions we see outside of the traditional church environment.
I watched part of the beginning worship. It started with the valley of dry bones from Ezekiel. This is a story that has really grown on me over the past few years.
Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’
The service started off with a bunch of people lying around the base of the altar. When I first saw it, I didn’t think of dry bones, I thought of a ‘die-in’. Is the church learning from the Black Lives Matters movement, I wondered to myself? Is this a statement about refugees washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea?
I saw what looked like Stephanie Spellers trying to get others to join her in prophesying to these dry bones. Her enthusiasm for bringing others into God’s work is what resonates for me. We were invited think about prophesying to dry bones in the 21st century. Shamika Goddard tweeted, “I don't always prophesy, but when I do I prefer to use Twitter.” I joined in with “Tweet, Rap, Freestyle, Free Verse, Free the oppressed, Declare Jubilee Show God's Love”
There were some good comments tweeted about flipped classrooms and audio story telling.
Yet some of it felt a bit too much like a social media marketing class. Creating a Church Social Media Plan: How do you get your message through in a media that is already over saturated with distractions? As I thought of the Sustainer, I also thought of the Creator. What are we creating?
In crafting media plans, you need to be aware of your audience. Is your communications Business to Business (B2B)? Business to Consumer (B2C)? Too often, it feels like people talking about church social media are talking about business to consumer communications. I think we need to be in the business of sinner to sinner and saint to saint communications (S2S). We need to weep with ‘Our Lady Mother of Ferguson and All Killed by Guns’. We need our communications, whichever medium is being used, to be redeeming.
Are our social media plans about getting butts in pews on Sunday morning, making sure that our metric of Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) is supported by new metrics of Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers? Personally, I dislike the ASA metric. Sunday morning is important to me. The buildings I worship in are important, yet as Shamika Goddard tweeted, I suspect quoting Father Albert Cutie, “Ppl are afraid for their church bldgs but they need to remember that the church started in the streets.”
We are created in the image of God. We need to reflect that image in our social media, not as part of a marketing plan, but as talking sinner to sinner and saint to saint, in seeking our voices to be creating, redeeming, and sustaining.
#PCWM8 Pregame
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/01/2016 - 19:59In about twelve hours, I’ll be hopping in my car and driving up to Podcamp Western Mass. Instead of rehashing what a Podcamp is, I’ll start off by pointing people not acquainted with podcamps to some of my older podcamp posts:
A good starting point is probably:
Understanding Unconferences - #pcct #swct
I’ll also recommend:
What is the Difference Between a Good Podcamp and a Great Podcamp?
and
#pcct - What Makes for a Good Podcamp Session?
These get into the sessions and the experience. People who know me from Podcamps know that I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to Podcamps. I’m not a big fan or presentations or Powerpoint and podcamp. I like organic discussions.
At Podcamp Western Mass over the past few years, there have been a lot of introductory sessions which provide great value for newcomers but also have the potential of obscuring something really important about podcamps, that everyone is a rock star.
There are also a few things that I miss from some of the older podcamps. Back in the day, there would be lively discussions online about what topics people were interested in. This hasn’t happened as much in recent years. One nice exception this year is that Maria Korolov posted about doing a show and tell about VR headsets. Maria knows her stuff about VR and if she comes and does the show and tell, it should be really good. I just hope that it will be a discussion where lots of people get to contribute.
Things that I’m interested in include
MOOCs, Moodle, and Rhizomes: The future of digital pedagogy.
It’s all about the content: Creativity, Spirituality, Politics, and everything in between.
The Darknet
Private or corporate social networks.
Anyone doing anything with Slack? I have http://ahynes1.slack.com set up. Let me know if you want to use it. If you do use slack, especially with any integrations, I’d love to hear about it.
Workflow tools: Some of the things I learned about at previous Podcamps included IFTTT and Evernote. These days, I’ve been playing a bit with Workflowy. Check it out.
Augmented Reality Gaming:
Any Ingress players going to Podcamp? Anyone play other games like Ingress?
What’s New:
I always love a What’s New session. Everyone mentions a new social network, mobile apps, or things like that which they are really enjoying. What new things are you finding exciting?
So, share your thoughts this evening about what you’re looking forward to. Then, let’s have fun tomorrow!
The Digital Church
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/14/2016 - 07:40In a recent online discussion, someone mentioned to me the idea that Christianity goes through a five hundred year trend of re-evaluation and remodeling. I was asked if I thought we might be at one of those once in every five-hundred year events. I’ve often wondered how close we are to another American Great Awakening. The Great Awakenings happen much more frequently.
It is interesting that this has come up in an online discussion, something that didn’t exist during the reformation or the early Great Awakenings. Many of my media oriented friends often talk about the Gutenberg Press as bringing about great changes in terms of education, politics, and religion. Is the Internet bringing about a similar change?
Much of my political involvement has been focused around online activities. The communities I belong to are often around common interests shared online and not around common geography. Yet our church structure is still seems to be primarily oriented around common geography. At the same time, people are looking at how to get Christianity out of the church building and more into the community. How does this relate to the church community being online?
The stuff we post online is much more permanent and searchable that the comments we make face to face or write in letters. If you know where to look, you can find stuff I posted online back in 1982. Recently, a friend died of cancer. I had met him through an online group back in the 90s, and people in the group are still connected online. They are sharing memories and pointing to photos that were shared back in the 90s.
In two different online religious groups, people have asked that personal information either not be shared, or shared with the smallest amount of personal information necessary.
Now I get some of the desire for privacy. When I started considering more deeply what God is calling me to last spring, I was hesitant to talk publicly about it. Part of it was that it seemed God was calling me to a much more intimate relationship, and we are often restrained in talking about intimacy, especially when there is uncertainty about the relationship and vulnerability. Yet at the same time, as we become more sure of the relationship, we proclaim it boldly. I think of my friends posting life events on Facebook, a new relationship, the engagement ring, the marriage, the birth of a child. As I write this, I think of the song we sang in youth group years ago, “I’ll shout it from the mountain top, I want the world to know, the Lord of Love has come to me, I want to pass it on.”
I think of some of the meditations I’ve been reading recently, about our experience of God’s Incarnation, God’s love, God’s presence, happens in the simple parts of life, like appreciating the sunrise on the daily commute, or the kind words of a coworker at the office. How do we experience the presence of God online?
Likewise, I get the idea of telling one’s own story, and not someone else’s story. Yet when we think of our self as part of a community, part of the body of Christ, the line between my story and our story blurs.
When I get into discussions about acceptable behavior online, I often go back to Mark Prensky’s article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. He was writing in the context of education, but I like to think of it more broadly. In the context of this post, I have to wonder what a church of Digital Natives looks like.
Are the people who are more hesitant to share online digital immigrants? Are they the older folks regularly attending churches as opposed to the millennials who have by and large abandoned church? What might a church of the twenty first century, organized around online interests instead of geographical proximity look like?
I’m also interested in how all of this relates to addressing stigmas, confessing sin, and several other topics. I hope to be exploring some of these ideas in more detail over the coming months.
What are you Seeking?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/03/2016 - 19:40Today’s Daily Meditation from Richard Rohr is What You Seek Is What You Are.
Only when we are eager to love can we see love and goodness in the world around us. We must ourselves remain in peace, and then we will find peace over there. Remain in beauty, and we will honor beauty everywhere.
I guess this is something similar to, you are what you eat. I’ve written about this in the past, Does Facebook Make You Sad? It does seem like these days people seek conflict online.
Google’s US Trends for 2015 says a lot. Paris Under Attack. Adele’s Year. The Oscars. Caitlin Jenner. The 2016 Elections. This is what we searched for in the United States. It is similar in other countries, with Cricket or the Tour de France showing up as top topics.
This evening on Twitter, #OregonUnderAttack has been a hot topic as everyone puts their political spin on the events there.
I’ve tried to keep my focus elsewhere. The Society of Saint John the Evangelist’s word for the day is Rejoice, and they link to a post, Remembering Joy. That post talks about Ecclesia Ministries seeking ‘to take the gifts of church out to people who, for whatever reason, cannot come inside to receive them”.
Part of my focus is poetry. The poem for the day is Carl Sandberg’s The Answer. This poem captures some of what we seek.
My daughter Miranda shared a link to Adrienne Rich on Creative Process, Love, Loss, and Public vs. Private Happiness. I listened to a couple poems by Adrienne Rich on YouTube: What Kind of Times Are These and North American Time.
What are you seeking?
Shaping Ava
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/01/2016 - 10:33Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. Happy New Year! We perform our rituals, say our incantations in hopes that, somehow, this year will be better. For a day, we forget the quote attributed to Einstein, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, and make the same resolutions.
This year, I’ve been seeing a quote attributed to Mark Twain making the rounds, “New Year's Day--Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”
Last night, we had a YouTube Riff Off. This is a game we play where one person plays a song on YouTube, and the next person riff’s off of that tune, selecting some other tune the first tune made them think of. We go around and around as one tune leads to another and one mood gives way to the next. It is interesting to observe what emerges.
We started off with Auld Lang Syne and went to songs about children growing up, Cat’s Cradle, Circle Game. We went to the sending off phase of Black Parade and Carry on my Wayward son, to remembrances, in “Will you remember me”, “Box of Rain” and “Ode to Billie Joe” The Riff off culminated in a nod to religious coexistence in The Kennedys’ song Stand.
Perhaps it reflected some of the themes for the coming year, as Fiona potentially heads off to school and I explore more deeply my religious calling.
Afterwards, we watched “Ex Machina”. I’ve been interested in AI’s for a long time and remember a saying that AIs would end up looking like their creators. Back then, the folks working on AI were nerdy engineers. In Ex Machina, the guy creating the AI is a reclusive genius. The software for the AI is the large search engine he has created and made his fortunes off of.
It is an idea that has fascinated me for a long time. What if our search engines and social networks are the new AIs, or at least the source of information for these AIs about social behavior? Seem unlikely? It’s already happening.
IBM'S Watson Can Figure Out A Lot About You—Just By Looking At Your Social Media
IBM Is Using Watson To Psychoanalyze People From Their Tweets
Matters Of The Mind: Mass. Computer Scientist Creates Technology To Read Emotions
So, are we now just pawns, nodes in some giant AI? Are the results of the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign already predetermined? Does it matter who gets elected anyway? Are we just amplifying echoes in the social media echo chamber when we like or share messages about Trump, Bernie, or Hillary?
Can we shape Ava? If so, how?
It seems easy to be discouraged when you look at all the issues our country and our world faces. Will what I write help shift the direction of climate change? Will what I write help bring an end to oppression; to racism or sexism?
I chose to remain optimistic. I think Robert Kennedy’s quote provides some insight.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Here, we could go off into a long discussion about whether sharing posts that reflect our political or religious views counts as standing up for an ideal. We could talk about slacktivism and whether we are just going back to paving the road to hell. Yet that, too, most likely leads to hopelessness and inaction.
Instead, I think David Foster Wallace presents a more useful way of looking at it in his commencement speech, This Is Water
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
Perhaps this is the real challenge, for the new year, for each day, in shaping Ava, to challenge the default settings, to pay attention, to be aware, not only to the trending topics on Facebook or Twitter, but to the simple things around us, the beauty of the squirrel running in the woods, probably the same squirrel that has been raiding your bird feeder, the common humanity of the homeless guy you see on the street.
Happy New Year.
