new media news Posts

A few weeks ago a newsletter brought written reports about the latest round of conflict at a local meeting that's been fighting for the past 180 years or so. As my wife and I read through it we were a bit underwhelmed by the accounts of the newest conflict resolution attempts. The mediators seemed more worried about alienating a few long-term disruptive characters than about preserving the spiritual vitality of the meeting. It's a phenomena I've seen in a lot of Quaker meetings.

Call it the FDR Principle after Franklin D Roosevelt, who supposedly defended his support of one of Nicaragua's most brutal dictators by saying "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Even casual historians of Latin American history will know this only led to fifty years of wars with reverberations across the world with the Iran/Contra scandal. The FDR Principle didn't make for good U.S. foreign policy and, if I may, I'd suggest it doesn't make for good Quaker policy either. Any discussion board moderator or popular blogger knows that to keep an online discussion's integrity you need to know when to cut a disruptive trouble-maker off--politely and succintly, but also firmly. If you don't, the people there to actually discuss your issues--the people you want--will leave.

I didn't know how to talk about this until a post called Conflict in Meeting came through Livejournal this past First Day. The poster, jandrewm, wrote in part:

Yet my recognition of all that doesn't negate the painful feelings that arise when hostility enters the meeting room, when long-held grudges boil over and harsh words are spoken.  After a few months of regular attendance at my meeting, I came close to abandoning this "experiment" with Quakerism because some Friends were so consistently rancorous, divisive, disruptive.  I had to ask myself: "Do I need this negativity in my life right now?"

I commented about the need to take the testimonies seriously:

I've been in that situation. A lot of Friends aren't very good at putting their foot down on flagrantly disruptive behavior. I wish I could buy the "it eventually sorts out" argument but it often doesn't. I've seen meetings where all the sane people are driven out, leaving the disruptive folks and armchair therapists. It's a symbiotic relationship, perhaps, but doesn't make for a healthy spiritual community.

The unpopular solution is for us to take our testimonies seriously. And I mean those more specific testimonies buried deep in copies in Faith & Practice that act as a kind of collective wisdom for Quaker community life. Testimonies against detraction and for rightly ordered decision making, etc. If someone's actions tear apart the meeting they should be counseled; if they continue to disrupt then their decision-making input should be disregarded. This is the real effect of the old much-maligned Quaker process of disowning (which allowed continued attendance at worship and life in the community but stopped business participation). Limiting input like this makes sense to me.

The trouble that if your meeting is in this kind of spiral there might not be much you can do by yourself. People take some sort of weird comfort in these predictable fights and if you start talking testimonies you might become very unpopular very quickly. Participating in the bickering isn't helpful (of course) and just eats away your own self. Distancing yourself for a time might be helpful. Getting involved in other Quaker venues. It's a shame. Monthly meeting is supposed to be the center of our Quaker spiritual life. But sometimes it can't be. I try to draw lessons from these circumstances. I certainly understand the value and need for the Quaker testimonies better simply because I've seen the problems meetings face when they haven't. But that doesn't make it any easier for you.

But all of this begs an awkward question: are we really building Christ's kingdom by dropping out? It's an age-old tension between purity and participation at all costs. Timothy asked a similar question of me in a comment to my last post. Before we answer, we should recognize that there are indeed many people who have "abandoned" their "Quaker experiment" because we're not living up to our own ideals.

Maybe I'm more aware of this drop-out class than others. It sometimes seems like an email correspondence with the "Quaker Ranter" has become the last step on the way out the door. But I also get messages from seekers newly convinced of Quaker principles but unable to connect locally because of the divergent practices or juvenile behavior of their local Friends meeting or church. A typical email last week asked me why the plain Quakers weren't evangelical and why evangelical Quakers weren't conservative and asked "Is there a place in the quakers for a Plain Dressing, Bible Thumping, Gospel Preaching, Evangelical, Conservative, Spirit Led, Charismatic family?" (Anyone want to suggest their local meeting?)

We should be more worried about the people of integrity we're losing than about the grumpy trouble-makers embedded in some of our meetings. If someone is consistently disruptive, is clearly breaking specific Quaker testimonies we've lumped under community and intergrity, and stubbornly immune to any council then read them out of business meeting. If the people you want in your meeting are leaving because of the people you really don't want, then it's time to do something. Our Quaker toolbox provides us tool for that action--ways to define, name and address the issues. Our tradition gives us access to hundreds of years of experience, both mistakes and successes, and can be a more useful guide than contemporary pop psychology or plain old head-burying.

Not all meetings have these problems. But enough do that we're losing people. And the dynamics get more acute when there's a visionary project on the table and/or someone younger is at the center of them. While our meetings sort out their issues, the internet is providing one type of support lifeline.

Blogger jandrewm was able to seek advice and consolation on Livejournal. Some of the folks I spoke about in the 2003 "Lost Quaker Generation" series of posts are now lurking away on my Facebook friends list. Maybe we can stop the full departure of some of these Friends. They can drop back but still be involved, still engaging their local meeting. They can be reading and discussing testimonies ("detraction" is a wonderful place to start) so they can spot and explain behavior. We can use the web to coordinate workshops, online discussions, local meet-ups, new workship groups, etc., but even email from a Friend thousands of miles away can help give us clarity and strength.

I think (I hope) we're helping to forge a group of Friends with a clear understanding of the work to be done and the techniques of Quaker discernment. It's no wonder that Quaker bodies sometimes fail to live up to their ideals: the journals of  olde tyme Quaker ministers are full of disappointing stories and Christian tradition is rich with tales of the roadblocks the Tempter puts up in our path. How can we learn to  center in the Lord when our meetings become too political or disfunctional (I think I should start looking harder at Anabaptist non-resistance theory). This is the work, Friends, and it's always been the work. Through whatever comes we need to trust that any testing and heartbreak has a purpose, that the Lord is using us through all, and that any suffering will be productive to His purpose if we can keep low and listening for follow-up instructions.

Churches Retool Mission Trips - washingtonpost.com

A growing body of research questions the value of the trips abroad, which are supposed to bring hope and Christianity to the needy of the world, while offering American participants an opportunity to work in disadvantaged communities, develop relationships and charge up their faith. Critics scornfully call such trips "religious tourism" undertaken by "vacationaries."

My brand of religious don't do this kind of mission work but we are more and more enchanted with long-distance conferences. We now address every issue with a conference but do we ask any "research questions" about their effectiveness? The web is a great tool to extend the conference outward and yet, despite all the content that could be easily ported to the web, most conferences, consultations and gatherings barely exist online.

I know that real life has it's own value--I was happy to have a visit from individual traveler Micah Bales this weekend, a Friend with a great talent for the good question that stays with you long after his bus departs. I just wish I saw more media coming out of these big events, more ways to bootstrap the volumes of content produced at these events into something we can use for outreach.

If anecdotal evidence is an indication, most of the people who have come to Friends in the last half-decade first encountered us on Beliefnet, a for-profit dot-com with no connection to any Friends body. It's definitions of "Liberal Quakers" and "Orthodox Quakers" have become more important (de facto) than all of our books of Faith and Practice. Beliefnet, Wikipedia and a site called Religious Tolerance have become the definers of our faith to millions of seekers. Nothing we're doing comes close to Beliefnet.

And this is part fo the reason I've been fascinated by a Youtube video that was made this weekend. It's an introduction to "liberal Quakers" by someone who's never been to Quaker worship. While this might sound presumptuous, the real crime is that hers is the only American liberal Quaker introduction on Youtube. What the hell are we doing, Friends? I've been corresponding with the Youtuber. She's 22, a spiritual seeker who cobbled together a spirituality after following a couple of dead-end spiritual paths. She came across the Beliefnet quiz, came out a "liberal Quaker" and started looking for real world Friends. She tried the meeting in her home town but it looked deserted (!) and so started an email correspondence with a Friend she found on another meeting's website. She did the Youtube video because she couldn't find any American introductions and wanted to give back, especially to younger seekers that might not respond to a British Youtube series. Yes her video is awkward and a little sketchy on some points of liberal Quaker theology, but it's honest and doesn't contain any viewpoints you won't hear around most meetinghouses.

PS: Since writing this I've come across the first video from the just-concluded FGC Gathering. I don't know if it'll help with outreach but it is really funny. Thanks Skip, I feel like I was there! 

Long in the works, my O'Reilly Media-published "Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators" is available. The title could sort of be boiled down to "hey this QuakerQuaker.org thing has become kind of neat" but it's more than that. I wax lyrical about the different kind of aggregator community sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media arena: "folksonomic density" (Google it now kids and you'll see the only references are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the technosphere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ushered in the second phase of the Age of Aquarius, yada yada).

A hundred thank you's to my fine and patient editor S. (don't know if you want to be outed here). I've been an editor myself in one capacity or another for fifteen years (I've sometimes even been paid for it) so it was educational to experience the relationship from the other side. I wrote this while living an insane schedule and it's amazing I found any time at get all this down.

As luck would have it I've just gotten my design site at MartinKelley.com up and running fully again, so I hope to do some posts related to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the meantime, below is the marketing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators. It is available for $9.99 from the O'Reilly website.

Web aggregators select and present content culled from multiple sources, playing an important taste-making and promotional role. Larger aggregators are starting to compete with mainstream news sources but a new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggregators are organizing around specific interests. Niche aggregators harness the power of the internet to build communities previously separated by geography or institutional inertia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role. Understanding their operation is critical for those wanting to understand or predict cultural change and for those who want to harness the power of the long tail by catering to niches.

For any bleeding edge Web 2.0 Quakers out there, there's now a QuakerQuaker FriendFeed account to go along with its Twitter account. Both accounts simply spit out the QuakerQuaker RSS feed but there might be some practical uses. I actually follow QQ primary by Twitter these days and those who don't mind annoying IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 everywhere man Robert Scoble recently posted that many of his conversations and comments have moved away from his blog and over to FriendFeed. I don't see that occurring anytime soon with QQ but I'll set the accounts up and see what happens. I've hooked my own Twitter and FriendFeed accounts up with QuakerQuaker, so that's one way I'm cross-linking with this possible overlay of QQ.

For what it's worth I've always assumed that QQ is relatively temporary, an initial meeting ground for a network of online Friends that will continue to expand into different forms. I'm hoping we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the latest trends. As far as the Religious Society of Friends is concerned, I'd say the two most important tests of a new media is it's ability to outreach to new people and its utility in helping to construct a shared vision of spiritual renewal.

On these test, Facebook has been a complete failure. So many promising bloggers have disappeared and seem to spend their online time swapping suggestive messages on Facebook (find a hotel room folks) or share animated gifs with 257 of their closed "friends." Quaker Friends tend to be a clannish bunch and Facebook has really fed into that (unfortunate) part of our persona. Blogging seemed to be resuscitating the idea of the "Public Friend," someone who was willing to share their Quaker identity with the general public. That's still happening but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I'm not ready to close my own Facebook account but I would like to see Friends really think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapting--railroads, newspapers, frequently flier miles have all affected how we communicate with each other and the outside world. Computer networking is just the latest wrinkle.

As a personal aside, the worst thing to happen to my Quaker blogging has been the lack of a commute (except for a short hop to do some Haddonfield web design a few times a week). I'm no longer stranded on a train for hours a week with nothing to do but read the journal of Samuel Bownas or throw open my laptop to write about the latest idea that flits through my head. Ah the travails of telecommuting!

For those who love real-live conspiracies, there's the case of this week's three cut undersea cables.

On Wednesday the anchor of a ship off of Alexandria, Egypt, sliced through two important fiber optic internet cables that serve critical traffic between Western Europe and the Middle East and India. On Friday, a cable off Dubai was cut for still undetermined reasons, one proffered explanation being (yes) an errant anchor. One commentator called it "a national disaster," citing the almost complete loss of communication in Egypt; about 20-30% of Indian's traffic is affected. Here's a cool map of the undersea world from the Guardian.

Apparently some aren't calling these closely-time cuts such a coinkydink. The USS Jimmy Carter nuclear submarine (named after a US Navy submarine officer who later went into politics) is a spy sub specially designed with a kind of underwater "shuttle craft" perfect for installing taps. Can we add large-scale internet failure to the cost of war?

When I was about seven I wrote a school report on the Glomar Explorer, a hugely-expensive deep-sea drilling ship built by eccentric gazillionaire Howard Hughes to extract minerals from the ocean floor. Well, at least that was the cover story. Shortly after my report, the Los Angeles Times uncovered the real story: the Glomar Explorer was a CIA ship built to recover a sunken Soviet sub off of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean (I myself didn't learn about this until only a few years ago).

Then of course there's the true stories of the secret White House, secret Pentagon and secret Congress, three separate underground mini-cities carved inside Appalachian ridges in the 1950s to be used in case of Ruskie attack. The locations are well known now. Interesting Fact #1: if you study maps you'll see underused interstate highways leading from Washington to the secret White House and secret Pentagon, ready for quick escape. Interesting Fact #2: the secret Congress is much further away, has no mysteriously-placed highway and was unknown to most if not all members of Congress; whoops!, no legislative branch! I can't find the websites listing all this very quickly but they're there and it's all pretty much out in the open now. When looking I found Interesting Fact #3: the White House East Wing was built in WWII to hide construction of a underground bunker, the famous "War Room" fictionalized in Doctor Strangelove. Veeery interestink, mein fuhrer, I mean mein President.

For those thinking I'm just busting on the U.S., rest assured. I have one client in a Far East Asian country I won't name who can't access this website, my design site, her internet bank, or any Blogspot-hosted site because the country's leaders have put a firewall around the whole frigging country, blocking off sites they don't like!

MONDAY UPDATE: From Egypt's Ministry of Communication: "A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time." (via Jesse Robbins @ O'Reilly)

I recently applied for a position at a well-known Quaker social justice organization and decided to put together something of an activist resume. The resume I usually circulate understandably focuses on my tech work and professional experience and tries the impossible task of downplaying the Quaker connection (I've almost heard the application being crumpled on the other end of a phone interview when I've tried to explain what an "Advance and Outreach Coordinator" does!). I should have known that in the Bizarro World that is Quaker peace activism I wouldn't even get a sit-down interview for a job I'm professionally over-qualified for, but putting together this alternative time line was kind of fun so I'll share it here.

1987: Internship, United Farm Workers. Staffed petition drive out of NYC office, planned Philadelphia-area appearances by Cesar Chavez. I even got to do a little ghost writing for Cesar!

Late 1980s: Core member of Students Against Sexual Stereotyping, Villanovans Against Racism, VCACA (Central America solidarity) and other college-based social justice initiatives.

1988-9: Editor, The VACUUM, an alternative weekly for Villanova University. Most notably raised campus awareness around issues of acquaintance rape. Such a proto-blog publication, I should repost some of those articles someday! Right: vintage picture from the yearbook.

1991: Intern, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Peace Committee. Participated in anti-recruitment counseling, preparation of Camden NJ's Newton Friends Meeting for tutoring program.

1991: Member, Corn Rice and Beans affinity group. Street theater, etc., started vigils for first Gulf War on west side of City Hall.

1991: Founding member, Philadelphia anti-war coalition.

1992: Organizer of responses to Christopher Columbus re-enactment ships' arrival in Philadelphia. Participated in various actions that acted as core of Philadelphia Inquirer coverage (article behind paywall but starts "Hey, Columbus, ya shoulda stayed home. Shouldn't have come to America. Definitely shouldn't have come up the Delaware. The Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria... sailed into Philadelphia yesterday..., expecting a hero's welcome. Instead they got bludgeoned by the vast array of anti-Columbus forces.")

1994-6: Founding member, Philly Food Not Bombs. Collected food & served at area protests and at weekly meals in West Philadelphia.

1993: Acquisitions Editor onStopping Rape: A Challenge for Men by Rus Ervin Funk.

1994-7: Board member, New Society Educational Foundation. Served as treasurer in critical time of transition.

1995: Acquisitions Editor, With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion, and Moral Imagination by Joseph Gerson. A co-publication with the American Friends Service Committee.

1995: Acquisitions Editor, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel. Still listed as a top-40 book on racism by Amazon.com.

1995-present: Founder, Nonviolence.org. One of the first peace-focused internet portals. Through this project served as webmaster to numerous national U.S. peace groups including War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi USA.

1996: Fellowship, Friends Institute of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to support Nonviolence.org development.

1997-8: National Committee Member, War Resisters League.

1998: Profile, New York Times, "Iraqi Crisis Increases Activity on Peace Network" (Feb 21). Headlining article in CyberTimes edition. Still have desk and bookshelves, cat was old girlfriend's.

1998: Featured Op-Ed, USAToday, "Missiles Aren’t the Answer" (Nov 16th).

1998: Featured Guest, Oliver North Radio Show (Nov 16). To my everlasting regret, Ollie had a guest host on Mondays and I was eviscerated by his fill-in!

2000: Video/Web Transfer Editor, Philadelphia Independent Media Center. Edited and transfered raw footage of the Republican National Convention to the Philadelphia Indymedia.org website. I should dig up my protest videos and post them sometime.

2005: Fellowship, Clarence and Lilly Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership Program. Named after long-time AFSC Executive Director and his wife, fellowship supported development of new online magazine.

2006: Organized media campaign to support members of Christian Peacemaker Teams kidnapped in Iraq. Created syndicated news feeds for both activist and Quaker audiences.

Related: professional resume, workshops and publications list, list of organizations I've worked with, LinkedIn profile.

• In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones
  Half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones... Mobile phone novels... have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, “turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns."
  (tags: publishing)
• "Why can’t we be Friends?", Kirk W finds Quaker video on YouTube
  It’s a good mix of earnest effort and teenage humor. They’ve got the Quaker Oats gag in there (several times) but they manage to get past that. They even have some of our Friends in it.
  (tags: comment)
• Video: Quakers Rock (via QuakerQuaker.org)
  High school history project video . "Why the Quakers in the Middle Colonies of the Colonial Era were better,.. a very funny film staring superspeed native beating and a transvestite Scarlett O'Hara." Warning: Oat jokes, non-PC humor. (via Kirk W)
  (tags: quaker quaker.youth quaker.depictions)
• Peter B on reading Marcus Borg on reading the Bible
  That’s me in a nutshell—my personal faith and practice in five simple sentences—and the first bit could just as well have been a quote from George Fox with the language updated and the thee’s and thou’s taken out.
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal quaker.christianity)
• Sheffield Gordon on the relationship of individual and community
  If we fail to make the distinction between community, fellowship and friendship [then] we will allow ourselves to become subsumed into the overwhelming individualism of our age, and we will become merely another political action group.
  (tags: quaker quaker.witness)
• Six Apart sells its LiveJournal service to the Russians
  "The company continues to lead in the blogging and social media industry with the Movable Type Publishing Platform, the TypePad hosted blogging service, and Vox, a free blogging service for friends and families."
  (tags: tech tech.movabletype)