Thoughts after listening to the latest edition of the podcast:
So we can imagine Mark Zuckerberg and his assistant both wearing t‑shirts and jeans, but one of them buys from, say, DKNY or Kenneth Cole, while the other buys from Target or Wal-Mart. This would count as a responsible form of plain dress, per Barclay.
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.
The recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting looks at five ways we can keep our worship spaces active and visible:
We can often get very loyal to our meeting places, and I think that’s natural. We’ve often had some of our most profound personal experiences there. They are important places of community and worship, and they can and do work hard for us. But our loyalty to them doesn’t mean that they’re going to work for everyone, and if they’re not going to become ‘steeple houses’, then I think it’s important that we look at them every now and again and ask ourselves some questions.
http://www.quaker.org.uk/blog/5‑ways-to-make-quaker-meeting-houses-work-for-the-future
Interesting application of business theory to different types of Quaker cultures:
Did you identify the culture type of your Quaker faith community — more specifically, the portion of that community where you spend the most time? It’s possible that yours might be a pretty even tie between two culture types, but it’s less helpful if you say “we’re not really any of these.” Identify one or two that seem relevant and work with it for a few minutes here. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder.
I’m particularly intrigued by her placement of the children’s program culture outside of the ones she assigns her meeting. I’ve met teens who grew up embedded in Quaker youth culture who are surprised when they hit adulthood and realize that they don’t connect with any of the adult activities. Back in the day I was part of Young Adult Friends programs that were partly attempts to continue that Young Friends culture in place in a twenty-something context. Acknowledging that there are sometimes fundamental cultural differences at work seems like a good start. Also, don’t miss Emily’s piece in the current Friends Journal, The Grief and the Promised Land.
Navigating Differences: An Application of Cultural Theory
An observation on the soil of God’s work — us:
For many of us, our predicament today seems most like the soil with the thorns: We want to draw closer to God and walk in God’s ways, but there is so much bad news, so many obligations, so many distractions. We can be led astray, sometimes without even knowing it. The founder of our movement, George Fox, once said that “whatever ye are addicted to, the Tempter will come in that thing; and when he can trouble you, then he gets advantage over you, and then ye are gone.” We can be addicted to many things: not just, say, alcohol or gambling, but ideas, both about the world and about ourselves.
Alone, none of us can do much to change the world. But we can allow ourselves to be instruments of peace, reconciliation, love. It’s easy to get stuck and tempting in those times to get defensive or look toward others. I’ve found the old Quaker take on “The Tempter” to be personally very useful. I’ve learned to question and go inward whenever I feel too much pride in something or find myself part of a group that seems self-satisfied with its work.
Isaac Smith was going to write something about creeds:
I had been kicking around writing something on the uses and abuses of creeds in the Quaker tradition, but then I discovered that Ben Wood had written a fairly definitive version of that essay already. So read that instead.
Ben’s 2016 piece on Quakers and creeds is definitely worth a read. I checked my records and I must have missed it at the time, so I’ll share it now. He goes deep into the kinds of creeds that Penn and Barclay gave in their writings but also what the earlier Christian creed-makers were coming from. He also comes to today. Here’s a taste:
we cannot be creed-makers before we are story-preservers and story-tellers. We cannot hope to resolve differences unless and until we dig down into our own Quaker story; unless we come to terms with its power and implications. At least part of our sense of spiritual malaise is a reticence to engage with the depth of the Quaker tale. Partly that reticence is about a lack of teaching ministry among Friends. We haven’t given each other the tools to become skillful readers of our own narrative. We have assumed that people can just ‘pick this stuff up’ through a mysterious process of osmosis. This has led to a fragmentation of understanding about the meaning and implications of Quaker grammar.
In my world, talk of creeds has sprung up recently following the QuakerSpeak video of Arthur Larrabee’s nine core principles of unprogrammed Friends. His principles seem fairly descriptive of mainstream Liberal Friends to me, but predictably enough the video’s comments have people worried about any formulation: “Espousing core beliefs — no matter how well intentioned — risks introducing a creed.” One of my pet theories is that the mid-century truce over theology talk that helped Quaker branches reunite (at least on the U.S. East Coast) has stopped working.
The producer of the Young Quaker Podcast looks back at the lessons of their much-publicized silent podcast:
At almost 3,000 downloads and counting, the podcast could be considered one of the biggest Quaker meetings ever held. In the aftermath of the media excitement, I began to try and unpick what had made this meeting so successful that Quakers and non-Quakers all over the world had ventured to participate in it. The conclusion I came to was its accessibility.
Why are we silent? How do we know what God (however defined) wants?
Worship, at least in the traditional understanding, is all about service — giving God what God wants/requires. You can tell what a community thinks God wants by looking at their worship service.
Friends Journal