Who tells our story in this time?  In today’s world of immediate news, and social media, and everyone having a twitter account and an opinion – there’s a lot of misinformation out there.  Some of it might be damaging and outright manipulative.  Some of it might just be misinformed people, who are confusing Quakers (for example) with Amish folks, or Shakers.

One of the reasons I’ve been so involved in Quaker media is my longtime concern that we’re in increasing danger of being defined by outsiders. A mainstream site with a page on Quakers can easily show up higher in search results than pages we create.  For a long time back in the day, an entry on Quakers written by some Unitarians on Religioustolerance.com was a top hit. Google and Facebook have long had more say in defining Quaker beliefs than any of our national organizations. Even when real-life Quakers are involved— in Facebook groups, Wikipedia editing, blogging, and the original Quaker.org—there was none of the kind of formal Quaker process (for better and worse) that historically characterized Quaker publishing.

One happy irony is that Kathleen herself came in through a channel with no Quaker involvement. She writes: ” I had never heard of Quakers until I took an internet quiz in my mid- thirties.” This is almost certainly the “Belief-o-Matic” Beliefnet quiz (confirmed in comments). The site was founded as a venture-capital-fueled  attempt to win the advertising religion market in the heady years of what we retrospectively call the dot-com bubble. The original quiz dates further back to a still-going site called SelectSmart, which hosts dozens of quizzes (“Which Bond Villain Are You?,” “What Pizza Topping Are You?,” “Pink Floyd Album Selector”), one of the most popular of which is “Belief System Selector.” The site is Curt and Lori Anderson, a husband-and-wife team; he was the techie who programmed the quizzes; she hunted for content. She used online sources and her local library to coming up with questions for him to plug in for the belief quiz (read some of the story here and also here). Beliefnet started hosting it independently, giving it a UI refresh and renaming it Belief-o-Matic. For whatever reasons of wonky algorithms huge percentages of people who took the test came out as “Liberal Quaker” or “Orthodox Quaker.” No Friends were involved in the quiz, hence the archaic names (few Friends have identified as Orthodox for generations).

In the 2000s, this quiz was inadvertently far more successful in outreach than any program conceived by Friends (sorry PYM/FGC/Pendle Hill donors). I think we’ve all become better at media and telling our own story but Kathleen’s question—who tells our story in this time?—is still a key one. After all, Lori Anderson’s checklist of beliefs (on SelectSmart and Beliefnet) are probably one of the most-read definitions of Liberal Quakerism.

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quakerkathleen.org

Updated July 2018

• 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?

Page not found — Friends Journal

Friends Journal

So today Neiman Labs posted an interview with Jason Kottke. Of course I like it.

There are a few things that Jason has done that I find remarkable. One is that he’s threaded an almost impossible path that has held back the centrifugal forces of the modern internet. He never went big and he never went small. By big, I mean he never tried to ramp his site up to become a media empire. No venture capitalist money, no clickbait headlines, no pivot to video or other trendy media chimera. He also didn’t go small: his blog has never been a confessional. While that traffic when to Facebook, his kind of curated links and thoughts is something that still works best as a blog.

Although I don’t blog myself too much anymore, I do think a lot about media models for Friends Journal. Its reliance on non-professional opinion writing prefigured blogs. It’s a fully digital magazine now, even as it continues as a print magazine. The membership model Kottke talks about (and Neiman Labs frequently profiles) is a likely one for us going into the long term.

Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20

So we’ve been asked to write a “synchroblog” organized by Quaker Voluntary Service. It is a weekday and there are work deadlines looming for me (there are always deadlines looming) so my participation may be spotty but I’ll give it a shot.

The topic of this particular synchroblog is Friends and social media and in the invite we were asked to riff on comparisons with early Friends’s pamphleteering and the web as the new printing press. I’m spotty on the details of the various pamphlet wars of early Friends but the web-as-printing-press is a familiar theme.

I first mangled the metaphors of web as printing press nineteen years ago. That summer I started my first new media project to get pacifist writings online. The metaphors I used seem as funny now as they were awkward then, but give me a break: Mark Zuckerberg was a fifth grader hacking Ataris and even the word “weblog” was a couple of years away. I described my project as “web typesetting for the movement by the movement” and one of my selling points is that I had done the same work in the print world.

Fractured as my metaphors were, online media was more like publishing then that it is now. Putting an essay online required technical skills and comparatively high equipment costs. The consistent arc of consumer technology has been to make posting ever easier and cheaper and that has moved the bar of quality (raised or lowered depending on how you see it)

Back in the mid-1990s I remember joking snarkily with friends that we’d all someday have blogs devoted to pictures of our cats and kids–the humor in our barbs came from the ridiculousness that someone would go to the time and expense to build a site so ephemeral and non-serious. You’d have to take a picture, develop the film, digitally scan it in, touch it up with a prohibitively expensive image software, use an FTP program to upload it to a web server and then write raw HTML to make a web page of it. But the joke was on us. In 2014, if my 2yo daughter puts something goofy on her head, I pull out the always-with-me phone, snap a picture, add a funny caption and filter, tag it, and send it to a page which is effectively a photoblog of her life.

The ease of posting has spawned an internet culture that’s creatively bizarre and wonderful. With the changes the printing press metaphor has become less useful, or at least more constrained. There are Friends who’s intentionality and effort make them internet publishers (I myself work for Friends Journal). But most of our online activity is more like water cooler chitchat.

So the question I have is this: are there ways Friends should behave online. If we are to “let our lives preach,” as the much-quoted George Fox snippet says, what’s our online style? Do we have anything to learn from earlier times of pamphleteering? And what about the media we’re using, especially as we learn more about electronic surveillance and its widespread use both here at home and in totalitarian regimes?

Reshared post from +Sergey Brin

In just two decades, the world wide web has transformed and democratized access to information all around the world. I am proud of the role Google has played alongside many others such as Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Twitter. Whether you are a student in an internet cafe in the developing world or a head of state of a wealthy nation, the knowledge of the world is at your fingertips.

Of course, offering these services has come with its challenges. Multiple countries have sought to suppress the flow of information to serve their own political goals. At various times notable Google websites have been blocked in China, Iran, Libya (prior to their revolution), Tunisia (also prior to revolution), and others. For our own websites and for the internet as a whole we have worked tirelessly to combat internet censorship around the world alongside governments and NGO promoting free speech.

Thus, imagine my astonishment when the newest threat to free speech has come from none other but the United States. Two bills currently making their way through congress — SOPA and PIPA — give the US government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial). While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don’t believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.

This is why I signed on to the following open letter with many other founders — http://dq99alanzv66m.cloudfront.net/sopa/img/12–14-letter.pdf
See also: http://americancensorship.org/ and http://engineadvocacy.org/

Embedded Link

http://dq99alanzv66m.cloudfront.net/sopa/img/12–14-letter.pdf

I will say that these guys are really good trackers. I sometimes think if I said “hittail” in my sleep I’d awake to an email thanking me for the mention. I’m always surprised at how many companies don’t follow their own public commentary on them across the internet, but Hittail certainly does.

I think there’s a lesson here. Prominent cultural institutions don’t look at Google (and SEO-friendly
developers) because they’re big enough and well-known enough that they
assume people will find them anyway. They’re right, of course, but how
many more people would find them if they had well-built websites? And
what’s the long-term vision if they’re relying on their established
reputation to do their web marketing?

It’s perhaps impossible
for a net-centric start-up to replicate a hugely-endowed cultural icon
like an orchestra or ballet, giving some degree of insulation to these
institutions from direct internet competition. But if these nonprofits
saw themselves in the entertainment business, competing for the limited
attention and money of an audience that has many evening-time
possibilities, then you’d think they’d want to leverage the internet as
much as they could: to use the web to reach out not only to their
existing audience but to nurture and develop future audiences.

Are the audiences of high brow institutions so full of hip young audiences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?