In defense of Quaker media

January 3, 2019

I gath­er that the Quak­er Face­book group is going through one of its reg­u­lar debates about iden­ti­ty and tone and mod­er­a­tion. The prob­lem is Face­book. It is the most direct com­peti­tor of Quaker-produced media. Its algo­rithms and mod­er­a­tor tools are not designed for the kind of con­sid­ered, inclu­sive, Spirit-led, and non-reactive dis­course that is Quak­er style at its ide­al (yes, we blow it our­selves con­stant­ly but hope­ful­ly keep striving).

I post­ed there tonight sug­gest­ing that Friends con­sid­er a media diet that includes more Quak­er media — books and mag­a­zines and blogs and videos and in-real-life dis­cus­sion oppor­tu­ni­ties. I wor­ry that if Face­book groups become the most vis­i­ble style of Quak­er dia­logue, then we will have lost some­thing tru­ly precious.

This mes­sage isn’t new to long­time read­ers of Quak­er­Ran­ter. I extolled blog­ging as a hedge against Face­bookjust yes­ter­day and in August I wrote about some of the dia­logue prob­lems inher­ent in the Face­book mod­el.

I’ve been fig­ur­ing out Face­book strate­gies for Quak­er media since it opened up to non-students cir­ca 2006. I appre­ci­ate much of the atten­tion it’s pro­vid­ed over the years. Social media like YouTube has also been a use­ful plat­form for things like the Quak­er­s­peak projectdespite own­er Google’s spot­ty track record. But it’s becom­ing hard to deny that social media has reshaped the style of civ­il dis­course and troll­ish hack­ery, most­ly for the worse. I think it’s real­ly essen­tial that we become more con­scious of the sources of our dai­ly media diet.

Upcoming Friends Journal themes

October 26, 2018

This week we unveiled the next slate of themes for Friends Jour­nal, one which takes us all the way through the end of 2020 (I can’t get over how much fur­ther away this feels than the cal­en­dar says it is). This is the sixth round of themes since we intro­duced the for­mat back in the begin­ning of 2012. We’ve kept the pat­tern the same – nine themed issues a year, with two non-themed issues for more eclec­tic mate­r­i­al we get (

Before 2012, the mix had been flipped for years: two annu­al spe­cial issues, with the rest a catch-all from the incom­ing sub­mis­sion slush pile. I feel that more fre­quent themes have helped us steer clear of the rut of repeat­ing the same arti­cles on a too-frequent basis. We’re also see­ing more arti­cles con­scious­ly writ­ten for us (as opposed to be shopped around to var­i­ous pro­gres­sive pub­li­ca­tions). Most impor­tant­ly from an edi­to­r­i­al per­spec­tive, the process  also forces us to reach out to peo­ple, direct­ly and on social media, to encour­age them to write. One of my never-ending, never- reach­able goals, is to always be encour­ag­ing new voic­es in the mag­a­zine. This is one tool to help get there.

We’ve already start­ed get­ting feed­back from indi­vid­u­als that their favorite cause isn’t cov­ered in this lat­est list. I’m okay with that. We don’t cov­er every­thing every round. Core con­cerns of Friends get cov­ered on a reg­u­lar basis in the non-themed issues. Some authors are also real­ly cre­ative in find­ing a hook to bring their cause into seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed top­ic. Also, I think we’ve cov­ered all of the major top­ics in the last sev­en years — some­times mul­ti­ple times — and those arti­cles are still be read and shared and com­ment­ed on.

Many of these themes come from read­er sug­ges­tions. Oth­ers come from more ran­dom con­ver­sa­tions we have. One of my favorite this time is the issue on Gam­bling. That was inspired one late-January 2018 morn­ing when a new Friend called in to ask us if we had any arti­cles on the top­ic. Appar­ent­ly, she had been chas­tised at meet­ing that week­end for sug­gest­ing there should be a prize for who­ev­er guessed the cor­rect num­ber of valen­tine can­dy hearts in a jar. She want­ed to under­stand the Quak­er tes­ti­monies. Much to my sur­prise there had­n’t been much in recent Friends Jour­nal arti­cles. I ran­dom­ly asked on Face­book whether we had “essen­tial­ly dropped” our tes­ti­mo­ny on gam­bling. The resul­tant Face­book thread quick­ly made it obvi­ous that Friends have an issue-worthy amount of feel­ings on the topic.

Have fun look­ing over the list. If you have sug­ges­tions, let me know (I will write them down and remem­ber). If you want to encour­age peo­ple to write, please please do. Also, send me a mes­sage if you want to get on a month­ly email list in which I pro­mote an upcom­ing writ­ing dead­line. The next com­ing up in for March’s issue, Out­side the Meet­ing­house.

Facebook superposters and the loss of our own narrative

August 26, 2018

In the NYTimes, a fas­ci­nat­ing piece on fil­ter bub­bles and the abil­i­ty of Face­book “super­posters” to dom­i­nate feeds, dis­tort real­i­ty, and pro­mote para­noia and violence.

Super­posters tend to be “more opin­ion­at­ed, more extreme, more engaged, more every­thing,” said Andrew Guess, a Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty social sci­en­tist. When more casu­al users open Face­book, often what they see is a world shaped by super­posters like Mr. Wasser­man. Their exag­ger­at­ed world­views play well on the algo­rithm, allow­ing them to col­lec­tive­ly — and often unknow­ing­ly — dom­i­nate news­feeds. “That’s some­thing spe­cial about Face­book,” Dr. Paluck said. “If you end up get­ting a lot of time on the feed, you are influ­en­tial. It’s a dif­fer­ence with real life.”

A great many general-interest Face­book groups that I see are dom­i­nat­ed by troll­ish peo­ple whose vis­i­bil­i­ty relies on how provoca­tive they can get with­out being banned. This is true in many Quaker-focused groups. Face­book pri­or­i­tizes engage­ment and noth­ing seems to get our fin­gers mad­ly tap­ping more than provo­ca­tion by some­one half-informed.

For­mal mem­ber­ship in a Quak­er meet­ing is a con­sid­ered process; for many Quak­er groups, pub­lic min­istry is also a delib­er­at­ed process, with clear­ness com­mit­tees, anchor com­mit­tees, etc. On Face­book, mem­ber­ship con­sists of click­ing a like but­ton; pub­lic min­istry, aka vis­i­bil­i­ty, is a mat­ter of hav­ing a lot of time to post com­ments. Pub­lic groups with min­i­mal mod­er­a­tion which run on Face­book’s engagement-inducing algo­rithms are the pub­lic face of Friends these days, far more vis­i­ble than any pub­li­ca­tion or rec­og­nized Quak­er body’s Face­book pres­ence. I writ­ten before of my long-term wor­ry that with the rise of social media gate­keep­ing sites, we’re not the ones writ­ing our sto­ry anymore.

I don’t have any answers. But the NYTimes piece helped give me some use­ful ways of think­ing about these phenomena.

Friends Journal seeking articles on Quakers and Christianity

August 7, 2018

The Decem­ber theme of Friends Jour­nal will look at the juicy top­ic of Friends’ rela­tion­ship with Chris­tian­i­ty. I wrote up an “Edi­tor’s Desk” post about the kinds of arti­cles we might expect. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s a series of ques­tions that has dogged Friends since we did away with cler­gy and start­ed call­ing bap­tism a “sprin­kling,” and it has been an issue of con­tention in every Quak­er schism: Are we Chris­t­ian? Are we real­ly Chris­t­ian? Does it mat­ter if we’re Chris­t­ian? What does it even mean to be Chris­t­ian in the world?

One rea­son we began pub­lish­ing more themed issues begin­ning in 2012 was so we use the top­ics to invite fresh voic­es to write for us. While we’ve long had reg­u­lars who will send us a few arti­cles a year on mis­cel­la­neous top­ics, themes allow us to tempt peo­ple with spe­cif­ic inter­ests and min­istries: rec­on­cil­i­a­tion from war, cli­mate activism, work­place reform, men­tor­ship, ecu­meni­cal rela­tion­ships, the wider fam­i­ly of Friends, etc.

More recent­ly I’ve start­ed these “Edi­tor’s Desk” posts as a way of shar­ing some of the ideas we have around par­tic­u­lar upcom­ing issues. The post also gives us a URL that we can share on social media to drum up sub­mis­sions. I also hope that oth­ers will share the URL via email.

The absolute best way of reach­ing new peo­ple is when some­one we know shares an upcom­ing theme with some­one we don’t know. There are many peo­ple who by chance or incli­na­tion seem to strad­dle Quak­er worlds. They are invalu­able in ampli­fy­ing our calls for sub­mis­sions. Ques­tion: would it help if we start­ed an email list just for writ­ers or for peo­ple who want to be remind­ed of upcom­ing themes so they can share them with Friends?

The open (Quaker) web

April 23, 2018

Chris Hardie’s semi-viral man­i­festo cham­pi­oning the open inter­net isn’t about Quak­erism per se, but Chris is a Friend (and one time web host to every­thing Quak­er with­in a hun­dred miles of Rich­mond, Ind.). Since the rise of cor­po­rate gate-keeping web­sites and then social media, I’ve wor­ried that they rep­re­sent some of the largest and least vis­i­ble threats to the Quak­er movement.

I use it all as a tool, for sure. But there are many ways in which we’re increas­ing­ly defined by cor­po­ra­tions with no Quak­ers and no inter­est in us except for what­ev­er engage­ment num­bers they can gen­er­ate. Look at the non­sense at many of the open Quak­er Face­book groups as an obvi­ous exam­ple. Peo­ple with lim­it­ed expe­ri­ence or knowl­edge and rel­a­tive­ly fringe ideas can eas­i­ly dom­i­nate dis­cus­sion just by post­ing with a fre­quen­cy that involved or care­ful Friends couldn’t match. Face­book doesn’t care if it’s a zoo as long as peo­ple come back to read the lat­est out­ra­geous com­ment thread. Just because the top­ic is Quak­er doesn’t mean the dis­course real­ly holds well to our val­ues, his­tor­i­cal or modern.

Add to this that Google and Face­book could make any of our Quaker-owned web­sites near­ly invis­i­ble with a tweak of algo­rithms (this is not hypo­thet­i­cal: Face­book has dinged most pub­lish­er Pages over the years).

The open web has a lot of plus­es. I’m glad to see a Friend among its promi­nent cham­pi­ons and I’d like to see Quak­er read­ers seek­ing it out more (most eas­i­ly by stray­ing of Face­book and sub­scrib­ing to blogs’ email lists). From Hardie:

Of course, there is an alter­na­tive to Face­book and oth­er walled gar­dens: the open web. The alter­na­tive is the ver­sion of the Inter­net where you own your con­tent and activ­i­ty, have min­i­mal depen­dence on third par­ty busi­ness mod­els, can dis­cov­er new things out­side of what for-profit algo­rithms show you, and where tools and ser­vices inter­act to enhance each oth­er’s offer­ings, instead of to stamp each oth­er out of existence.

https://​chrishardie​.com/​2​0​1​8​/​0​4​/​r​e​b​u​i​l​d​i​n​g​-​o​p​e​n​-​w​e​b​/​a​m​p​/​?​_​_​t​w​i​t​t​e​r​_​i​m​p​r​e​s​s​i​o​n​=​t​rue

Could Quakerism be the radical faith?

April 23, 2018

Isaac Smith won­ders whether the title of Chris Ven­ables’s recent piece, “Could Quak­erism be the rad­i­cal faith that the mil­len­ni­al gen­er­a­tion is look­ing for?,” is fol­low­ing Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.

I’d put the dilem­ma of Quak­erism in the 21st cen­tu­ry this way: It’s not just that our trea­sures are in jars of clay, it’s that no one would even know the trea­sures were there, and it seems like they’re eas­i­er to find else­where. And how do we know that what we have are even treasures?

I gave my own skep­ti­cal take on Ven­ables’s arti­cle yes­ter­day. Smith hits on part of what wor­ries me when he says cur­rent reli­gious dis­en­gage­ment is of a kind to be immune to “bet­ter social media game or a more stream­lined church bureau­cra­cy.” These are the easy, value-free answers insti­tu­tions like to turn to.

I’m think­ing about these issues not only because of this arti­cle but also because Friends Jour­nal is seek­ing sub­mis­sions for thr August issue “Going Viral with Quak­erism.” A few weeks ago I wrote a post that referred back to Quak­er inter­net out­reach 25 years ago.

Could Quak­erism be the rad­i­cal faith that the mil­len­ni­al gen­er­a­tion is look­ing for?

Whassup Quaker Internet?

April 4, 2018

The August issue of Friends Jour­nal will look at “Going Viral with Quak­erism.” I wrote an Editor’s Desk post with some ideas of top­ics I’d love to see and some queries:

  • Do we have a vision of what kind of Quak­erism we’re invit­ing peo­ple into?
  • Does grow­ing neces­si­tate cast­ing off or re-embracing var­i­ous Quak­er practices?
  • Can we point to spe­cif­ic and repro­ducible tasks that meet­ings have done that have led to growth?
  • Are there mod­els from oth­er church­es or social change move­ments that we could learn from?
  • What are the dan­gers of over-focusing on growth?
  • Is there real­ly a pos­si­bil­i­ty that Quak­erism could become a mass movement?
  • What would our Quak­er expe­ri­ences look like if our num­bers rose even ten-fold?

One thing that’s miss­ing there is the inter­net. Yet one of the most com­mon things peo­ple want to talk about when we talk about grow­ing Friends is the inter­net. I think we’ve got­ten to the point at which we can’t just pin our hopes for future vital­i­ty of the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends on the inter­net. It’s not a build-it-and-they-will come phe­nom­e­non, espe­cial­ly now that so much of the inter­net’s atten­tion mech­a­nisms are dom­i­nat­ed by billion-dollar companies.

I went into the Friends Jour­nal archives to get a lit­tle per­spec­tive on Friends’ evolv­ing rela­tion­ship with elec­tron­ic media. The word “inter­net” first showed up near the end of 1992, in a short announce­ment of a new Quaker-themed list­serv. In 1993 there was a fan­tas­tic arti­cle on elec­tron­ic net­works, The Invis­i­ble Meet­ing­house. Writ­ten by Joel GAzis-SAx, it describes the Quak­er Elec­tron­ic Project as

an ongo­ing year­ly meet­ing that Friends around the world can join any time. It is, at once, a library, a meet­ing­house, a social cen­ter, and a bul­letin board. W e have cre­at­ed both a com­mu­ni­ty and a resource center…

Amaz­ing­ly, many of the peo­ple men­tioned in this arti­cle from 25 years ago are still active online.

The first “http” web address was pub­lished in Friends Jour­nal in a 1995 issue. In June 2001 the mag­a­zine announced its own web­site; the word “blog” debuted in 2004, “Face­book” in 2007, “Twit­ter” in 2011. Obvi­ous­ly, the inter­net is great for out­reach. But time check: we’ve been col­lec­tive­ly reach­ing out online for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry. Every orga­ni­za­tion has a web­site. Blogs and social media have become a set­tled tool in outreach.

Intro­duc­tions to the web and tech­niques and how-to’s have been done. But how do these var­i­ous media work togeth­er to advance our vis­i­bil­i­ty? What kind of expand­ed out­reach could hap­pen with a lit­tle more focus? How does any online project inte­grate with real-world activ­i­ty. I’m not naysay­ing the inter­net; obvi­ous­ly, I could give my answers to these ques­tions. But I’d like to know what oth­ers think about our Quak­er elec­tron­ic projects a quar­ter cen­tu­ry later?