Exploring Religious Community Online (Digital Formations) [Paperback]

Heidi Campbell (Author)

Book Description

Series: Digital Formations | Publication Date: June 1, 2005

Exploring Religious Community Online is the first comprehensive study of the development and implications of online communities for religious groups. This book investigates religious community online by examining how Christian communities have adopted internet technologies, and looks at how these online practices pose new challenges to offline religious community and culture.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Heidi Campbell is is Assistant Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University. Her research has appeared in a range of publications including New Media and Society and the book Religion Online: Finding Faith in the Internet.

Product Details

• Paperback: 213 pages
• Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820471054
• ISBN-13: 978-0820471051
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #983,795 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Heidi Campbell is Assistant Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University where she teaches in the areas of New Media, Popular Culture and Religion. She has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Computer-Mediated Communication & Practical Theology. Since 1997 she has studied religion online and the influence of new media on religious communities. Her work has appeared in New Media and Society, Journal of Media and Religion, Journal of Contemporary Religion and the book Religion Online (Dawson & Cowan, Routledge 2004). She is author of Exploring Religious Community Online (Peter Lang, 2005), co-editor of A Science and Religion Primer (Baker Academic, 2009) and When Religion Meets New Media (Routledge 2010) on how Jewish, Muslim & Christian communities negotiate their use of new media. She has been quoted as an expert on religion and the internet in numerous outlets including the Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, Australian ABC Radio and on the BBC Radio World Service.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Networked Religion, July 19, 2005

By 

Barry Wellman (Toronto, Ont Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Exploring Religious Community Online (Digital Formations) (Paperback)

It used to be said that people sent prayers skyward. Now they use the internet. Heidi Campbell does an impressive job of showing how people find religion online and offline. And when people go online, religion changes. People are weaving together a variety of religious experiences. They're creating networked personal religion instead of belonging to only one denomination and congregation. This is an on-the-scene account, impressively combining reportage and theory.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Using a New Media, September 27, 2005

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Exploring Religious Community Online (Digital Formations) (Paperback)

For centuries religion was limited to the spoken word backed up by a precious few documents laboriously copied by hand. It should be no surprise that when printing was invented, the first document to be printed in volume was the Gutenberg Bible. Then as radio and subsequently television became available so did the religious use of the new media. With each advance the ability to communicate expanded in volume and shrank in cost.

It should then be no surprise that as the new electronic media became available the churches began to take advantage of the new possibilities offered. As Catholic Archbishop Chaput said, 'For us to miss the opportunity new technologies give us to preach and educate and inform would be harmful to the mission of the church.'

This book discusses research on how religions have used the Internet and e-mail to expand their ministry. And how individuals have used these same media to find what they seek in religion.

4.0 out of 5 stars Listserv culture, February 8, 2011

By 

Clint Schnekloth "Clint S." (Fayetteville, AR) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Exploring Religious Community Online (Digital Formations) (Paperback)

This well-researched and helpful book illustrates how quickly the landscape changes in the digital world. Just about the time you think you have scaled the mountain and reached the peak, the mountain itself changes locations. In this case, Campbell's book is a dissertation on religious communion online, and she uses three e-mail based groups (listservs) as her ethnographic research base.
I remember the heady days of listservs. I was on a few throughout the nineties, and was sometimes a passionate and even over-zealous participant. I remember one listserv in particular, something on theology and the emergent church, that kept me coming back to my computer every few minutes to see if a new comment had been posted. The amount of intellectual energy and emotional ardor invested in the discussions was extraordinary. Some debates would get my heart racing, and it is definitely the case that many of the discussions (conducted during the years while I was in seminary and on the field in global missions) shaped how I think of faith and the church yet today.

So reading Campbell's book was like an exercise in nostalgia, the only problem being that I would not have expected to feel nostalgia reading a book written in 2005 and research in the early part of the 21st century. It is moments like these when I realize just how quickly our culture and media are changing around us.

On the other hand, things may not be changing as quickly as I think. I was also reminded while reading Campbell's book of all the wonderful collections of correspondence (letters) I have read over the years, like Flannery O'Connors Habit of Being, the letters exchanged between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, the massive collection of letters Melancthon wrote to statesmen, scholars, and clergy all over Europe, and so on ([...]). People have been writing letters to each other for millennia, and in doing so were typically seeking the same list of attributes of community listserv participants seek in their listserv participation: "relations, to be connected and committed... to be see as valuable as an individual and as part of a community... consistent communication, intimate communication, where individuals share open about their believes and spiritual lives... and gather around a shared faith that influences how they see others and how they see connections between the epistolary relationship and their other relationships." Which is simply to say that it seems to me that people by and large use listservs for the same relational purposes they made use of letters for in the past--as a "supplement rather than a substitute for an individual's involvement in the local." Interestingly, "also used as a baseline... to describe or even critique [the world beyond the letter exchange]."

Campbell takes the wise approach of an ethnographer, asking not whether an online group can be a community, but "What type of community does an online group represent?" The majority of the book is a report on and analysis of three listserv's she observes over a multi-year period, including a Pentecostal-charismatic group on the gift of prophecy, an evangelical group that offered care and support for its members, and an Anglican listserv that functioned as a way for far-flung Anglicans to interact around a range of issues. If you have never participate in a listserv before, these chapters can make essential reading for understanding the content and function of listserv groups.

In the early part of the book, Campbell sets the stage for clarifying how we are to think of such groups as online community. I found her reference to Michel Bauwens taxonomy of emergent spiritual practices on the web to be especially helpful (see the full essay at [...]. Bauwens defines three emergent types of web-based spiritual practice. I offer definitions here, and since I'm a sci-fi nerd of a fairly major sort, I also include reference to movies or books that I think portray these:

1. God Project- Technology is seen as having God-like aspects, a crude substitute for godlike powers. One very recent example of this would be the movie Tron:Legacy [...], where his dudeness Jeff Bridges sits in Zen-like meditation for decades waiting for release from the cyber-world he constructed and then traps himself in. People who think technology can provide them with this cross between magic and tech are called, I learned, technopagans. I wish Campbell would have done ethnographic research on this group!

2. Electric Gaia- Technology is a necessary adjunct to make improvements in consciousness possible. I think the movie Avatar was taking a stab at this one, as was perhaps the movie Inception. In literature, one of my favorite recent novels in this genre is Cory Doctorow's Makers. In this model, the "noosphere" emerges as a kind of global consciousness that busts people out of isolation. I find this the most intriguing category personally, even as I sometimes think most of us who envision it have to utopian a vision of what technology of this sort can accomplish.

3. Sacramental Cyberspace- Presents the internet as a place to further the aims of a particular religion. Clearly, this third category is the one most often thought of and out of in religious communities, and it is the category best represented in Campbell's ethnographic research. William Gibson has also been working with this category in his more recent near-future novels. The movie The Social Network does as well, not furthering a religion per se, but initially it seems to say that Facebook is set up to further the aims of Harvard or Ivy League-ness.

For my money, the next ethnographic research dissertation that needs to be written (maybe it has and I just haven't read it) needs to be researching (1) or (2) above. As far as how to apply Campbell's research to the present era (2011 instead of 2005), we would need to take into account how participants are creating community online using the new social media of Facebook and Twitter. In this case, I think the new media has changed the content, inasmuch as everything is brief (150 characters or less) rather than the length of an e-mail. And does anybody still even subscribe to a listserv?