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How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net

May 3rd, 2004
by .

Every once in awhile I get an indi­ca­tion that var­i­ous “weighty” Quak­ers come to my “Quaker Ranter” site, usu­ally because of a group email that some­one sends around or a post on some list­serve. What’s fas­ci­nat­ing is that few of the insider Friends ever spend much time look­ing around: they go to the one page that’s been ref­er­enced and then–swoosh, they’re gone, pre­sum­ably back to their email or list­serve. There’s a pro­found lack of curios­ity about what else I might be writ­ing about. These insti­tu­tional Friends never post com­ments and they rarely even send any feed­back by email.

This con­trasts very sharply with the bulk of traf­fic to my site. Dozens of peo­ple a day come in off a Google search. Unless it’s a bad match, these seek­ers spend time on the site, click­ing all around, fol­low­ing links to other sites, com­ing back, read­ing some more. Not every­one comes in via search engines: some fol­low links from else­where while oth­ers read the RSS Feed or just come in ever few days to see what’s new.

Part of the dif­fer­ence between “insti­tu­tional” and “seek­ing” users is in their use of search engines. Many estab­lish­ment Quak­ers don’t know how to use them or don’t think to use them. A web­site mar­ket­ing pro­posal of mine was almost nixed recently when a com­mit­tee mem­ber learned that search engines bypass a site’s home­page to return results from inside pages. I just assumed that every­one knew by now how a search engine works. I use Google dozens of times a day; it’s hard for me to imag­ine any­one nav­i­gat­ing the net with­out it. It must almost be like they’re using a sep­a­rate medium. Both of us are using the inter­net as trans­mis­sion con­duit, but that’s like say­ing both a news­pa­per and a per­sonal let­ter use paper and ink for tran­si­tion: while this is indis­putably true, it doesn’t begin to speak to the dif­fer­ent use and the depth of audience.

* * *

I won­der if the inter­net divide rep­re­sents an even more sig­nif­i­cant divide between insti­tu­tional insid­ers and the rest of us. The insid­ers might be staff, com­mit­tee clerks or just very involved Friends but they share a cer­tain way of under­stand­ing their world. First off, they have their ideas all fig­ured out already. There’s a lack of curios­ity here. They aren’t search­ing for new writ­ers or new ideas. They will only con­sider some­thing after some other Quaker insti­tu­tion has rec­og­nized it, a Catch-22 sit­u­a­tion that the mil­i­tary refers to as “inces­tu­ous amplification.”

Any project out­side of the estab­lished recog­ni­tion zone is invis­i­ble. Even ones that have become dom­i­nant in their field are acknowl­edged only begrudg­ingly. In the last ten years, Quaker​.org has done more for out­reach than just about any institutionally-sponsored pro­gram or com­mit­tee. Yet I know of estab­lish­ment Quak­ers who still think of it as an upstart, and truly believe their put­ter­ing about is more impor­tant, sim­ply because their orga­ni­za­tion has been around longer. In truth, many Quaker web­sites get so lit­tle traf­fic as to be next to non-existent.

The insider’s pri­mary point of ref­er­ence is insti­tu­tions. Power comes from know­ing how ideas, pro­pos­als and deci­sions flow through these orga­ni­za­tions. A good idea is only good if it’s made by the right per­son and vet­ted by the right small group first. Some­times I’ll hear of the gos­sip of some group schem­ing within some Quaker insti­tu­tion and I always have to laugh: like, WHO CARES? It’s a small bunch of peo­ple scram­bling over crumbs while the world ignores them. There’s a whole other world of Friends and seek­ers out there build­ing their own cul­ture and con­nec­tions, or try­ing to.

This Quaker Ranter site is pri­mar­ily for those still curi­ous, for those still inter­est­ing in build­ing some­thing real, for those want­ing engag­ing con­ver­sa­tion and sto­ries. I actu­ally pre­fer it to be a lit­tle bit “under­ground,” unknown or for­got­ten by insti­tu­tion­al­ists, for I think there’s dis­cus­sions we need to have and the open inter­net is a good place for that.

More

I’ll be edit­ing and adding to this post over time as I see more pat­terns of site use. I’m curi­ous if oth­ers have seen sur­pris­ing pat­terns of inter­net use. Oh, and by the way I should cop to being a Quaker insider myself, though I always try to keep the big pic­ture (i.e., God and the Spirit’s com­mands) foremost.

Posted in: Publishing & Tech, Quaker.
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  • http://an-angel-there.blogspot.com ::a::

    Hi. You have a great blog going here. I am inter­ested in Quak­erism, but can­not make it to meet­ings so I’m happy to find a good Friendly blog to read. :) By the way, I added you to my blogroll, ok?

  • Ken Stock­bridge

    Hey Mar­tin,
    First, I hope you know but it’s worth repeat­ing that I’m a big fan of yours. I greatly appre­ci­ate all you do in your day job, and when I stum­ble across reminders of how much else you do with the rest of your time, I’m even more grate­ful. I did not know until just now about quak​erquaker​.org, and it seems like a great idea. I hope I can find time to spend more time there. (I hope other FGC Advance­ment and Out­reach com­mit­tee mem­bers would like to know about the Out­reach sec­tion. So I hope we will let them know about it. Mmm? A link from the A&O page per­haps?)
    Sec­ond, regard­ing your post about insid­ers vs. seek­ers using the net, you ask some very inter­est­ing ques­tions. And it exem­pli­fies one of the things I appre­ci­ate about your labors so much. Your study of this sort of thing is very valu­able, and the insights you draw from these efforts are very help­ful.
    Third, how­ever, I find myself stum­bling a bit over your con­clu­sions, which I trust are pre­lim­i­nary. It’s a wor­thy enough the­sis, and you may be right. But there’s a tinge of judg­men­tal­ism there, which by itself is fine in this con­text, but I’m not sure your judg­ments are war­ranted. Are there alter­na­tive expla­na­tions? So, let me pose some queries.
    1) Purely out of curios­ity… how exactly do you decide who is an insider and who is a seeker? by how they find the site? how they use it? in either case, or any other, couldn’t users you put in one group actu­ally come from the other? (or do you know who all the insid­ers are and how to iden­tify them, you insider you? ;-) )
    2) While you can objec­tively observe how rarely insid­ers stick around on a site, how can you really know *why* they don’t stick around? To say they have a lack of curios­ity sounds like a judg­ment to me, being one who highly val­ues curios­ity. Is it pos­si­ble they have a high level of curios­ity, but just very lit­tle time? (That would be me! But am I an insider? Mmm. Just in case some­one thinks I am, I just had to post a com­ment!!)
    3) While I have lit­tle doubt that many Quak­ers don’t use search engines much, can you really con­clude that’s the rea­son for the dif­fer­ence? Is sug­gest­ing a skill defi­ciency on their part a put­down? Is it sim­ply pos­si­ble that for the spe­cific pur­pose that brought them to the sites in ques­tion, they did not need a search engine because they knew where to look? And does your way of iden­ti­fy­ing who is an insider bias your obser­va­tion of how they use the site, for exam­ple if how they got there has any­thing to do with it?
    4) It is cer­tainly pos­si­ble that the insid­ers could think they have every­thing fig­ured out or that they could be more open to new ideas and new writ­ers. And that would be unfor­tu­nate. I very much share your con­cern about insid­ers ver­sus the rest of us (or them, as the case may be). But at the begin­ning of that para­graph, you use the word “might” but by the mid­dle you have switched to affir­ma­tive dec­la­ra­tions of what is. Is that jump­ing to a con­clu­sion? Would it be more effec­tive if left as a query rather than an accu­sa­tion?
    5) By the end of your piece, has it become a rant rather than the research inquiry it started as? Given the name of your site espe­cially, rant­ing is your pre­rog­a­tive. But would it be more truth­ful to make a clearer dis­tinc­tion between what is objec­tive research and what is rant?
    I totally share the con­cerns you raise about insti­tu­tion­al­ism, and I encour­age you to con­tinue to raise them. How­ever, those con­cerns and con­clu­sions do not fol­low (at least clearly and con­vinc­ingly) from the analy­sis you have pre­sented on web use. Might both pur­poses (ana­lyz­ing how the web is used and rais­ing the con­cern) be bet­ter served by main­tain­ing a clearer dis­tinc­tion between them? Your analy­sis might be more con­vinc­ing and lead to more prac­ti­cal and effec­tive insights. And your con­cern might have greater weight if grounded on a more solid foun­da­tion of expe­ri­ence that bet­ter demon­strates the con­cern than a poten­tially shaky web analy­sis in its cur­rent form.
    So, let me offer an alter­na­tive the­sis that might explain the dif­fer­ence you observe. I don’t mean to advo­cate for it but sim­ply illus­trate how the same objec­tive evi­dence could just as eas­ily have a dif­fer­ent expla­na­tion. Let your ongo­ing research test this the­sis as well as yours.
    Could it be that the insid­ers using the sites in ques­tion are dri­ven by a very spe­cific pur­pose whle the seek­ers are in fact dri­ven by curios­ity? The insid­ers might be under­tak­ing a very spe­cific task relat­ing to their “inside work” like doing com­mit­tee work. They might know quite specif­i­cally what they are look­ing for and when they have found it, they con­tinue on with the task at hand. In con­trast, the very pur­pose of a seeker is to explore.
    This alter­na­tive the­sis does not nec­es­sar­ily con­tra­dict your con­cern. It may in fact help make a stronger case for it. In short, do those of us who are busy with insider work fix­ate so much on the task at hand that we are not present to the diverse bless­ings that are there for us if we but look? Does this fix­a­tion mold our per­cep­tion of real­ity in a way that leaves us out of touch? That’s not really dif­fer­ent from one core piece of your mes­sage, but it’s grounded in what you do objec­tively observe. Still, it stops short of ascrib­ing causes for their behav­ior, such as a lack of curios­ity or inter­net know-how, which I sus­pect you do not know exper­i­men­tally.
    Well, I really was too busy to stop and share this. I really do have to cut back on the com­mit­tees I’ve signed on to. It does skew my expe­ri­ence of life, and it is not sim­ple. I hope this has been of some use. Sorry I can’t stick around and explore your site more!
    Thanks for all you do.
    Ken

  • http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/ Mar­tin Kelley

    Hi Ken,
    You raise good ques­tions. There’s no way to put num­bers on any of this, it’s just the accu­mu­la­tion of a mass of anec­dotes and those rare moments when I have been able to iden­tify par­tic­u­lar peo­ple in the track­ing logs. None of this really has to do with Quak­ers, its just the world I know well enough to make this type of obser­va­tion.
    The impor­tant thing is not the thinking-out-loud details and debat­able opin­ions of a blog post but the larger mes­sage that the decision-makers in any media or out­reach project need to remem­ber that they are sep­a­rated from their tar­get audi­ence by fairly sig­nif­i­cant cul­tural dif­fer­ences. There’s a nat­ural ten­dency for peo­ple to design a project that might appeal to them­selves. A con­stant polling and double-checking of assump­tions make it more likely our work will reach out fur­ther.
    In web design we have the addi­tional sit­u­a­tion in which even a very logically-designed web­site might not get used in the way we expected it. One way to ques­tion our­selves is to look to see how sites are actu­ally being used and to draw any infer­ences we can from the data.
    I know that there are peo­ple who rarely use search engines–don’t think to–whereas I must run three dozen google searches a day. That’s going to give one a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of the inter­net. The expe­ri­ence is also going to be dif­fer­ent for those who do a lot of Instant Mes­sag­ing; or those whose pri­mary expe­ri­ence is an inten­sive online com­mu­nity like Myspace; or those whose inter­net use is pri­mar­ily made up of email or music down­load­ing. I could write more but I have to go catch a train. Thanks for com­ment­ing in.

  • http://www.quakerseeker.blogspot.com tesmith

    I have won­dered at var­i­ous times if “Quaker insti­tu­tion” is (or should be) an oxy­moron. Can Seek­ers of Truth, believ­ers in Con­tin­u­ing Rev­e­la­tion, etc. be con­tent with some­thing that almost by def­i­n­i­tion is intended to main­tain some­thing in place.

    • http://www.martinkelley.com/ Mar­tin Kelley

      There’s noth­ing nec­es­sar­ily wrong with main­tain­ing some­thing in place.
      “Con­tin­ual Rev­e­la­tion” shouldn’t be per­mis­sion to just go wher­ever we want
      with this Quaker tra­di­tion. But yes, we need to be con­scious about what
      tools we use to pro­vide that con­ti­nu­ity. Once insti­tu­tion­al­ism sets in, a
      bureaucracy’s mis­sion often becomes it’s own main­te­nance and growth.

      One of the neat­est thing about the web is that a bunch of moti­vated
      vol­un­teers can orga­nize the kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­work that would have
      required a lot of money and infra­struc­ture even twenty years ago.
      Hour-for-hour and dollar-for-dollar, what I do with Quaker Ranter and
      Quak­erQuaker is more effec­tive that any of the work I did as a pro­fes­sional
      Friend.

      • http://www.quakerseeker.blogspot.com tesmith

        Mar­tin,
        I com­pletely agree with you that Quaker tra­di­tion shouldn’t be blan­ket
        per­mis­sion. My father was and I have been a pas­tor within FUM. I have also
        worked with EFI indi­vid­u­als. My expe­ri­ence is that the “Fun­da­men­tal­ist” side
        of Quak­erism seems to rely too exten­sively on lit­er­al­ism and stuck with a
        very exclu­sive and nar­row view of “Chris­tian­ity.” My expe­ri­ence with
        “lib­eral” Quak­ers (with whom I have come to more closely iden­tify with in
        the past few decades) have lost a great deal of the Friends Tra­di­tion. The
        inclu­sive­ness that seems to be an under­ly­ing assump­tion is taken to the
        point of not just tol­er­ance but accep­tance of a very wide belief base that
        dilutes the power of “Friends Expe­ri­ence.” (Obvi­ously biased. but I think
        right­fully so, and hope­fully not PRE­judge­men­tal) The cel­e­bra­tion of
        diver­sity and tolerance/love of enemy does not mean agree­ment with their
        beliefs or actions but accep­tance of their worth and value as hav­ing that of
        God within them.

        My per­sonal belief is that the “2” sides have con­tin­ued to push each other
        fur­ther apart and thus fur­ther from the Cen­ter. (You know that to get 3
        opin­ions you need ask only 2 Quakers.)

        Thanks for your thought­ful response.

        In Peace and Friendship,

        Tom Smith

  • diana­mitchell

    well, I’m a Cana­dian Quaker. I just posted for the first time to Quaker Dharma, and look for 2009 post­ings there but see none. Quaker out­reach seems to be dying, as are so many of our Meet­ings here. Older and older we get, with lit­tle to encour­age Seek­ers, includ­ing that we don’t par­tic­i­pate in pub­lic forums any more, may march in the occa­sional protest, and gen­er­ally go to Meet­ings, go home, do noth­ing to seek Seek­ers. What a shame! And what a betrayal of the val­ues and prac­tices so long prac­tised by Quak­ers since Fox et al.

    I’m dead keen on out­reach, and see that reju­ve­na­tion comes with Seek­ers being encour­aged to come, to stay, to actively join with us so that Meetins are enlivened, lives are enriched, and pos­i­tive change is encouraged.

    I see you have par­tic­i­pated in the Quaker Dharma site. What’s hap­pened to it, do you know? Diana in Vic­to­ria BC

    • http://www.martinkelley.com/ Mar­tin Kelley

      Hi Diana: Quaker Dharma has never been a very active blog. It’s author Barry Crossno is now devel­op­ment direc­tor at the Pen­dle Hill Cen­ter near Philadel­phia. I’d guess that out­reach is still a keen con­cern of his, but he’s not pur­su­ing it online.

      If you fol­low the links on this site you’ll see I’ve been blog­ging about out­reach for years and so have many oth­ers. It’s inter­est­ing for me to reread this post from 2004. At that point I was an pro­fes­sional Friend (web­mas­ter for Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence) with a blog on the side. A year later I was pro­moted to Advance­ment and Out­reach Coor­di­na­tor for FGC and a year later let go for rea­sons that are long-winded and not really the “real rea­sons” any­way. Since then a lot of money has been spent on out­reach but it’s hard to see what’s come of it.

      A lot of us are work­ing on this over at http://​www​.quak​erquaker​.org. Please come join. It’s unof­fi­cial, unfunded, all-volunteer self-organized out­reach. There’s an “Out­reach and Media” group for talk­ing about out­reach, but the whole site is really about shar­ing the Good News Friends have with the world.

      There are a lot of cool out­reach efforts. Quak​er​info​.org is won­der­ful. I’ve been work­ing with FWC​CAmer​i​cas​.org over the last few months to put together a great inter­ac­tive map of Friends in the US and Canada which we launched just yes­ter­day. Evan­gel­i­cal Friends at Bar​clay​press​.com are doing good work. There is real inter­est out there, not as wide­spread as it should be and some­times more fund-driven that really outreach-driven. But let’s see what we can do!

  • Bar­bquin

    I’m not sure about the insid­ers vs seek­ers dichotomy…Because I’m an active mem­ber of a Friends meet­ing and I’m will­ing to put up with some­times annoy­ing Friends and try to build our in-person com­mu­nity often against dif­fi­cult odds and in spite of very stress­ful job duties, does that make me an “insider”?

    You know, it’s hap­pened that I’ve responded to ques­tions on Quak­erQuaker and the dia­log has ended there. I finally came to the con­clu­sion that I wasn’t an online insider :-)

    BTW, although I can’t do the exten­sive online stuff you do, I think I know how to use search engines …I teach online research to col­lege stu­dents.
    –Barbara

    • http://www.martinkelley.com/ Mar­tin Kelley

      Hi Barb: this post is over five years old. I was think­ing of the Friends who had been weighty com­mit­tee Friends for decades and seemed to spend much of their time with those who had also been weighty com­mit­tee Friends for decades. Some of the dynam­ics of online use have shifted since then. For one thing we have a half-generation that has come in through the internet.

      I know you cer­tainly know how to use search engines! The inter­nal dis­cus­sion at Quak­erQuaker are always a lit­tle funny. I often don’t get much out of them myself. My main con­cern is still the main blog feed–the editor’s picks.

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