This webpage will dutchify any location’s Google Street View, slimming lanes and adding greenery and bike paths. Yes, this everywhere please. Via Kottke.

I suspect a process may be at work similar to the one that has made “that of God in everyone” the putative foundation of all our testimonies: an unselfconscious thought-drift in a culture increasingly impatient with intellectual/theological rigor, or even attention of any serious kind, not to mention care for the testimony of integrity. These ideas arise somehow, somewhere, and then get picked up and disseminated because they sound nice, they meet some need, and they don’t demand much. They apparently don’t require discernment, anyway.

The “Testimony of Community”

During that time the domain registration for QuakerQuaker turned due. I must have missed the deluge of email that its domain registrar usually sends. I’ve paid the domain bill for another two years and it should be back up for everyone.

The ‘check-in’ is a fundamental element in the repertoire of a facilitator. There’s no better way to start a session and get everyone present, and there’s no faster way to discover what’s going on under the surface of a group. It’s such a simple an effective process tool that I figured it must have a rich and well-documented history. But it’s proved quite tricky to research, partly because its name is shared with the hotel and airline industries, but partly also, I suspect, because of its simplicity.

Where to start? With such a basic human process, the line through history will surely be tangled and confused. But, for the sake of starting somewhere, I’ll start with the Quakers.

I’ve left a comment on the post with missing links. I’ll leave a version of it here. Regular readers will predict that I’ll start with Rachel Davis DuBois, the New Jersey-born Friend who put together racial reconciliation groups in the mid-20th century. She later turned some of the process into “Dialogue Groups” in the mid-1960s and traveled the U.S. teaching them; these evolved into modern Quaker worship sharing and clearness committees.

Those late-60s processes were picked up by the younger Friends, who (no surprise) were also into antiwar activism and communitarian politics. They were codified and secularized by the Movement for a New Society, which started in Philadelphia in the early 70s but had communities all over the Western world. Much of their work was focused on training people in their style of group process and a lot of our facilitator tools these days are disseminated MNS tools. Many MNS’ers were involved with Quakers and many more filtered back into the Religious Society of Friends in later years.

A lot of this relatively recent history has been forgotten. Many Quakers will tell you these things all date from the very start of the Friends movement. There’s definitely through-lines and echos and inspirations through our history but I’d love to see us appreciate Rachel Davis DuBois and the people who made some very useful adaptations that have helped Quakers continue to evolve and (almost) thrive.

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.

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests (Published 2018)

Towns where people use Facebook more also had more attacks on refugees, building on suspicions that the platform…

www.nytimes.com

I must admit that the world of YouTube stars is foreign to me. This is essentially a webcam vlog post but the lighting and hair and costuming is meticulous. Her notes include affiliate links for the dress she’s wearing ($89 and yes, they ship internationally), a 8 1/2 minute video tutorial about curling you hair in her vintage style (it has over 33,000 views). If you follow her on Instagram and Twitter you’ll soon have enough details on  lipstick and shoe choices to be able to fully cosplay her.

But don’t laugh too much, because in between the self presentation tips, Kellgren-Fozard tackles really hard subjects–growing up gay in school, living with disabilities–in ways that are approachable and intimate, funny and instructive. And with a quarter million YouTube followers, she’s reaching people with a message of kindness and inclusion and understanding that feels pretty Quakerly to me. Margaret Fell liked herself a red dress sometimes and it’s easy to argue George Fox would be a YouTuber today.

Bonus:  Jessica Kellgren-Fozard will host a live Q&A chat on her Quakerism this coming Monday. If I’m calculating my timezones correctly, it’ll be noon here on the U.S. East Coast. I plan to tune in.

At first blush, such a process might be celebrated as a process of enrichment: Quakerism version 1 turns into Quakerism v2, now new and better because it has bells or outward sacraments or what-have-you. But note that this kind of change is not just a matter of simple addition, because elements drawn from various other traditions are themselves embedded deeply in some culture, and so they are clothed round with meanings and nuances that are implicitly adopted along with the idea or practice that has been explicitly imported.

Love, judgment, and the “inner critic”, pt. 2b: Syncretism, dilution, and the drawbacks of cultural appropriation

Meanwhile, membership dropped precipitously, as meetings applied discipline increasingly rigorously for walking disorderly in all manner of ways. In 1859, a prize of one hundred pounds was offered by an anonymous British Friend for the essay that best explained this decline and that offered the most promising solutions

The process was anything but overnight. As I understand the history it would be another half century from the prize to a yearly-meeting-wide shift. I don’t think many Friends in England appreciate just how Evangelical their yearly meeting has become in these years; their refusal to recognize American Hicksites led to the latter’s shunning from the world Quaker family and meant modernist Quaker responses would evolve on largely separate paths.

I wonder if British Friend William Pollard will make an appearance in Steven’s posts. I’ve been fascinated how Philadelphia Hicksites took to him despite the formal institutional barriers. [Update: Steven just dropped part three and there’s Pollard!]

The Rise of Liberal Quakerism—Part 2