This is an issue I’m concerned about as I explore ways to use social media for my Unitarian Universalist faith. For those of you unfamiliar with the movement, one of our chief tenets is the “inherent worth and dignity of all people”. We pride ourselves on being inclusive, yet our liberal religion is still largely comprised of educated older white people. We’re not proud of this demographic, and are seeking ways to attract others not like us.
Of course, we turn to social networking and Web 2.0 to reach out to the wide, wide, world. As we improve our strategy, it’s worth taking note of Riva Ricmond’s post in today’s Gadgetwise blog of the New York Times. Riva cites danah boyd’s speech at last week’s Personal Democracy Forum on how technology is changing politics. danah is a researcher work in social media research at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
dana believes we’re deceiving ourselves if we believe the Internet is a force for unity, and goes on to illustrate this by reciting the Unitarian Universalist-like demographics of Facebook (there are also educated African Americans and Asians on Facebook, too), while the younger, less educated and less white are populating My Space. Both of these networks are growing equally fast in terms of US Visitors.
From a sociological perspective, people do the same thing online as they do offline – they hang with their friends. It’s quite natural, but it begs the question of how do we (and can we) learn to appreciate our apparent differences and come together wherever we are? Perhaps we need to find a common interest or issue that’s cross-gender, cross-generational, and cross-cultural to rally around.
For Unitarian Universalists, this should be easy. We can reach across all boundaries as our message of inclusion, compassion, democracy and freedom is shared by everyone. All we need is a way to transmit our message. Our “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign, recently launched at last month’s General Assembly in Salt Lake City, has the potential for being this vehicle.
The trick for the success of this “Love” campaign, and any initiative seeking to cross boundaries, is in learning how to touch the deepest common parts of every human being and meeting them where they are. Then we can come together – online or offline – and recognize we’re not so different after all.
Tagged as:
unitarian universalism,
UU
Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?
by Carol on July 10, 2009
This is an issue I’m concerned about as I explore ways to use social media for my Unitarian Universalist faith. For those of you unfamiliar with the movement, one of our chief tenets is the “inherent worth and dignity of all people”. We pride ourselves on being inclusive, yet our liberal religion is still largely comprised of educated older white people. We’re not proud of this demographic, and are seeking ways to attract others not like us.
Of course, we turn to social networking and Web 2.0 to reach out to the wide, wide, world. As we improve our strategy, it’s worth taking note of Riva Ricmond’s post in today’s Gadgetwise blog of the New York Times. Riva cites danah boyd’s speech at last week’s Personal Democracy Forum on how technology is changing politics. danah is a researcher work in social media research at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
dana believes we’re deceiving ourselves if we believe the Internet is a force for unity, and goes on to illustrate this by reciting the Unitarian Universalist-like demographics of Facebook (there are also educated African Americans and Asians on Facebook, too), while the younger, less educated and less white are populating My Space. Both of these networks are growing equally fast in terms of US Visitors.
From a sociological perspective, people do the same thing online as they do offline – they hang with their friends. It’s quite natural, but it begs the question of how do we (and can we) learn to appreciate our apparent differences and come together wherever we are? Perhaps we need to find a common interest or issue that’s cross-gender, cross-generational, and cross-cultural to rally around.
For Unitarian Universalists, this should be easy. We can reach across all boundaries as our message of inclusion, compassion, democracy and freedom is shared by everyone. All we need is a way to transmit our message. Our “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign, recently launched at last month’s General Assembly in Salt Lake City, has the potential for being this vehicle.
The trick for the success of this “Love” campaign, and any initiative seeking to cross boundaries, is in learning how to touch the deepest common parts of every human being and meeting them where they are. Then we can come together – online or offline – and recognize we’re not so different after all.
Tagged as: unitarian universalism, UU