Stand Firm

Part 3 on Social Media Technology and the Episcopal Church

In the comments on my second post about 815’s doomed plan to revamp its slumping communications office, there is some talk about whether - and when - the office will ever learn how to employ new tools to its advantage in the ongoing campaign to turn the Episcopal Church into a post-Christian, pro-gay, pro-abortion political advocacy group.

I don’t really have any concern that 815 will ever be able to do this. I think Clay Shirky’s point is that there is only one “right” way to use the tools, that just as water seeks its own level, these tools seek their own “right” ways of being used; and that openness as well as unfettered many-to-many conversations are synonymous with that.

I did want to take a brief detour on Shirky’s claim that at the website my.barackobama.com, or “My Bo,” the Obama campaign was completely open, that it “convened” but did not “control” its supporters.

A large part of what “MyBo” did was offer individuals and groups their own blogs at the site, but after a trickle of hateful and frankly crazy entries became a flood, they began “cleansing” the site of offensive posts. In particular, there was a virulent strain of anti-Semitism in many of them. So many, in fact, that the site administrators had trouble staying ahead of the hateful posts. For a while, they were on the losing end of a game of hate-speech Whack-A-Mole.

While Little Green Footballs has of late veered leftward, with a strong anti-creationism theme morphing into what I think is a blatant anti-Christian theme, in the summer of last year it did an excellent job cataloging these “purging” incidents. Here are just a few:

I call this a “detour” because obviously Shirky is a very smart man, and his insights into social media are among the best you’ll find anywhere. And while on the particular matter of “My Bo” being a model of open speech his claims ignore the troubling appearance of - and scrambling effort to dispose of - a flood of anti-Semitic screeds, his observations on the role of media technology in social change are right on the money, and give us a lot of food for thought in our little corner of the world’s theological and political upheavals. My hope is that in subsequent presentations, in the interest of the kind of openness he seeks to illustrate, Clay will mention these incidents and deal with them. I think to continue ignoring them will soon weaken his message, while being candid about them can only strengthen it.

These incidents detract only slightly from Shirky’s point, but do serve to underscore my comment from yesterday that at some point between Pravda-like control of old media, and the complete anarchy of the many-to-many new-media network taken to its logical extreme, there is a point where social media reaches maximum value through a balance of control by a few, and participation by many. Here’s just one example from a few minutes I spent on Twitter yesterday:

Twitter features on its right sidebar a short list of “trending topics” - themes into which people “hook” by including a hash tag in their post. In a post at Mashable this morning, it’s reported that #iranelection was getting over 221,000 posts per hour yesterday. One of the trending topics that caught my eye was #nicerfilmtitles. One example by a poster I thought was funny was “Cakes on a Plane.” I offered “One Flew Over the Mental Health Facility.”

Watching the posts stream by was funny… for a little while. But in the time it took me to read the two dozen or so posts on screen, another 60 had been posted, so that when I refreshed my screen, I missed 20 or 30, unless I clicked the button to “See Older Posts,” which meant scrolling to the bottom of the page, waiting for it to refresh, and reading the ones I had missed. Problem was, doing that meant that by the time I was finished reading those posts, the number of new posts on the same topic was 75. With each cycle, that number kept rising. There was simply no way I could keep up. To add to the frustration, there were innumerable variations on “Thursday the 12th” and “Saturday the 14th,” as well as countless attempts that simply missed the point: “I Know What You Did Last Summer” may be a horror movie, but there’s nothing about its title that lends itself to being made “nicer” - or funny.

Pretty quickly, it became a losing battle. What I wanted was to spend 5 minutes over my morning coffee reading a few dozen good and funny examples, then move on to my real work. What I ended up doing was spending 10 minutes visually sifting through a couple of hundred rapid-fire tweets, easily 80% of which simply weren’t funny, or exact duplicates of many I had already seen.

What would have been better is for someone with a great sense of humor sit down with those thousands of posts, cull maybe two or three dozen, correct the punctuation and spelling, and present them as a compact list. I could have read that, and had my laugh, over my morning coffee in the 5 minutes that I can justify spending on nonsense like that.

Here’s another example: Facebook allows people to create, promote, and join groups. One problem Facebook has had is with neo-Nazi groups, which Facebook shuts down when it finds them. Problem is, the “police force” they have in place to be on the lookout for such groups can’t possibly do the job all by themselves. That’s why Facebook has a button labeled “Report This Group” on every group’s page: They are depending on the Facebook community at large to be self-policing, which of course requires that the Facebook community at large be, on balance, morally upright.

Both of those cases point to two huge problems of the many-to-many paradigm. One is that when “the conversation” is open to everyone, the quality of the discourse will more closely mirror the quality of discourse that can be achieved on any topic when everyone is given equal opportunity to participate. Which is to say - pretty low. There’s a reason there are 6 billion people on the planet but only a few hundred consistently good novelists, or singers, or painters, whose work people will pay to read, hear or see: Because excellence is by definition rare; it isn’t found in ubiquity.

The other is that there are morally reprehensible people in the world, and many of them have agendas they’re bent on pursuing, from neo-Nazi groups on Facebook to anti-Semites on My Bo.

So this brings me back to the need for some kind of editorial control in the free-for-all, many-to-many paradigm, and back to the tweak I would make to Shirky’s observations on the value of social media. What Shirky posits in his TED talk (and take care to note I’m not claiming this is the sum total of his message; he may well expand on this elsewhere) is a line with two end points; one representing the producer, and one representing the consumer. He is saying that social media shortens this line such that it’s actually eliminated - that it draws the two endpoints together until they are indistinguishable.

I’d say that that phenomenon alone is not where the greatest potential to change the world lies. I’d suggest that a more accurate description is not a line with two endpoints only, but a line with two endpoints and another point in the middle, representing the editors - the filters - who decide which producers’ contributions they believe are worthy of consumers’ attention. This may in fact be what Shirky means by “producers” - that the term as he uses it encompasses both content creators as well as editors - but that’s not what I took from his TED talk, at least.

The real importance of social media technology, then, is not that it allows everyone to be a content producer. The real importance is that it allows everyone a shot at being an editor - not simply to stand up and say, “I took this photograph,” but to stand up and say, “Here’s what this photograph means, and here’s why I think you should pay attention to it.” This is why there are no stores that carry every single item available on the market, and why some stores are more successful than others: Since they can’t possibly stock every single brand of rice or bread, for example, they make decisions about which ones are of high enough quality and low enough price that consumers will buy them. No one wants to shop in a store with all 1,800 brands of rice in the world (or however many there are). They want people who know their rice to pick a dozen so brands they feel are representative of the market, then categorize them on the rice shelf, and offer them at competitive prices.

That is what explains the success of this site such that it out-draws the Episcopal Church’s own site: A different group of editors has convened and said, “This is what this information means, and here’s why we think you should pay attention to it.” Yes, the reason we’re able to do this is because we don’t have the huge obstacle of expense and logistics required to set up and maintain a printing press or a television station. But no, it’s not because everyone with access to the web is allowed to contribute equally in a “come one, come all” environment. There are controls in place - from the purely mechanical to the purely cerebral - which, however scattershot it seems at times, bring order from chaos and meaning to information.

The beauty of what Shirky points out is that the same low barriers to entry and competitive potential that gave us the ability to wrest some control of the flow of information from 815, also works to keep us in check - all you have to do is visit our Around The Web section for proof: Any given morning, there is the possibility that we may wake up to find someone else out there giving orthodox Anglicans more of what they want than we do.

The proliferation of Anglican blogs in the wake of the Robinson consecration also illustrates Shirky’s point on China’s “Maginot Line” attempt to control information: 815, as well as all of its member dioceses, had their own Maginot Line in the form of press spokesmen and monthly print publications, as a way of controlling the information that got to the pews. But just as with Shirky’s point about China, the line was oriented the wrong way: It was quite good at controlling what came out of the official organs, but it was completely useless in controlling what was broadcast outside the line. It wasn’t that other, rival communications offices, with the same structure and mechanisms, were allowed to broadcast competing information to people in the pews; it was that the people in the pews themselves were the ones broadcasting the competing information. 815 never anticipated this, or if it did it never came up with an effective response.

So now we come to the question of why so many people choose to read us instead of, or in addition to, 815’s site. It’s because they sensed that something was wrong - they knew in their guts there was a problem with their church, and that it extended beyond their own little troubled parish and even their own troubled diocese. Once they found a stable, robust place where they could find examples and explanations of why this is - and discovered that their own voice could be heard in the debate - the game changed, both for them, and for the church that has been hiding this information all these years.

The “right” use of social media by the Episcopal Church leadership, then - in Shirky’s vision as well as in my variation on it - is like kryptonite to 815. If using it “right” means complete openness with a relatively low level of editorial control, then the inevitable result will be the collapse of the Episcopal Church as we know it, and the evacuation of its current leaders. They simply don’t have the numbers in the pews to take this church in the direction they want. Remember that their goal is to have the Episcopal Church, as it has been known and perceived in decades past, to give its official and universal imprimatur to an agenda which socially is aggressively pro-gay and pro-abortion, and theologically is aggressively universalist. Losing members at a rate and scope which renders the church a laughingstock in religious circles and a pariah in financial circles will not do; it will not qualify as a victory. Obviously there are many (us included) who say that we’re already past that point, but I maintain that what we have seen so far in these areas is of minor consequence compared to what will happen once the full extent of the Episcopal Church’s national agenda is known by the full number of its members - in other words, what will by necessity happen if 815 “embraces” social media technology. Anything else - anything that results in the truth about its agenda not being communicated to everyone - is not in fact a true use of social media technology. There are far, far more people who know nothing of this, than there are who know everything. A lot of water has to be drained from the pool before Schori, Louie and Integrity can call it a day, and the trend of how information flows to the pews is not, to say the least, on 815’s side.

I’ll suggest that the “flow of information to the pews” runs into a mental block at the walls of the local TEO parish. The revolt from the pews that one would expect to have occurred at least 5 years ago has been less than expected because of many pew-sitters’ long-established habit of “tuning out” 815’s shrillness and similar diocesean pronouncements. As long as the sermon isn’t grossly far out and the coffee is made in time for coffee hour, “all is well” to many pew sitters. As the radicalism of 815 becomes more blatant, it may impel some of the comatose to wake up, but it might just as likely be even more deeply attenuated by their deliberate deafness to things extramural. 815 may be trying to hide its radicalism from the check writers, but the check writers have been notably quite deaf to the sounds of their “church” being hijacked.

Integrity is broadcasting its message mainly along the lines of the old media model: one-to-many. Let’s see how open they are to discussion and debate once a few hundred of us get in there and start criticizing their agenda.

Greg, agreed. But YouTube has a ‘new media’ feature in that viewers can rate and comment upon the videos.

Our Worthy Opponents are always going on about engaging in dialog. None of the four videos have any comments. I find that rather sad. Does anyone wish to do something about these four bereft and forlorn videos?

What an absolutely fantastic take on this issue, Greg.
A perfect example of why I have come to SF for years, for this type of discourse.

Greg, I think what your saying is the internet is doing for media what a free market economy has done for manufacturing. Only those who present content that people want to read and discuss will have their blog read tomorrow.

I think it is also important to note that the people of our generation are looking for transparency and authenticity. No one will read a blog that is filled with lies, or where posts that are on topic and do not violate the norms of the blog are deleted.

My B.O. would have been seen as justified in deleting anti-semitic comments because they are considered “out of bounds” in our political discourse. Had they deleted criticism of the candidate’s change of position on an important issue, the site would have died quickly because everyone would recognize that the site was opaque and inauthentic. I do wonder how many sock puppets the campaign employed to keep the site interesting. (Sock puppets are, perhaps, one of the greatest threats to the open flow of information on the internet.)

I watched the ubuntu video, but not the others. The actors are really good, and the script is a classic.

That script makes the “usual” arguments that would deny the authority of Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. I didn’t see anything new. So, posting the usual counterarguments might be a worthwhile exercise, since the Disintegrity folks have chosen to put the videos out there for all to see. However, since the videos have apparently been seen by thousands of people, and there are no comments, one must wonder whether the view count is accurate, or whether comments are being removed.

Follow the money trail. Producing these videos can’t have been cheap. Never heard of that foundation.

Greg, the premise you make about the new media is really no different than any other market driven commodity. I love a football site called
http://smartfootball.blogspot.com/
and he cites a fellow blogger this way,

If you have a quality product people will come to it, buy it, use it, etc. Whether it is one to many or new media the rules are the same, quality sells.

I think his main point about the Obama site was that a group of people who were not on board with a plank in O’s agenda were able to stay with him when he said “No” to them - because his response showed that he had given them a listen. They were valued.

This is close to the idea that negative news need not be fatal to an individual or organization if there is honesty and consistency of values.

Watergate was a stupid little incident, really, but the “coverups” undid Nixon.

Tylenol could have been destroyed by the tampering incident, but pulled all its stuff off the shelves and spent a bunch to communicate with people about its remedial measures.

An Episcopal School in CA had a media dust-up over a teacher’s sexual antics with a student. The ultimate result of the coverage was that enrollment apps went up , because the school used the media exposure to highlight its attractive campus while stating its values and its remedial actions in light of how this one teacher had violated said values.

This gets back to GG’s central thesis, that the new media culture is TEC’s undoing. Eventually, “All is well”, “It’s only a few disgruntled people” and the other lies will bite TEC on the butt. Schori might or might not have to step down (there are plenty of Kool Aid drinkers to keep her around), but she will be discredited and her absurd claims of authority will be rejected more and more (as seen in Navajoland recently).

BTW TEC’s Facebook offering is just puff pieces commented on by said Kool Aid drinkers. It isn’t reaching anybody who doesn’t choose to look at it, and statistics show that people who’ve heard of TEC are already in it.

That may well be (Shirky’s compartmentalization of that one incident); I’m hoping he’ll take the time to clear it up if I’ve gotten him wrong.

To restate my thoughts in the second half of the original post, and to put it in more concrete terms, I just believe that while the resistance to the New Thing may certainly be weaker than we hope, there is just not, out there in the pews, the support for gay marriage, liturgies for abortion, and the undoing of Jesus Christ that 815 and their cronies want to put in place in every parish in the country. Yes, there are a few dioceses where a kind if lukewarm stasis has been reached with regard to membership and income, but even in California and Newark - the flagbearers of the New Thing - the financial situation runs from somewhat troubled to downright catastrophic. I’m saying that if 815 really used social media the way Shirky is talking about, to inform and involve a large number of people in a very short amount of time, it will suffer a very sudden and undignified collapse.

In physics there is something called Entropy. It is akin to the idea that if an object is at a temperature above (or below) the environment, the temperature of the object will decay steadily (without additional input) to the temperature of the environment at which point it will not be recognizable, thermally speaking.
I attribute this to ideas and thoughts posted on the internet, be they blogs or lists of chats. That when an idea is put forth that has attributes which put it above (or below) the current level of thought, the commenters will modify the idea with each post until it sinks into the random noise of incoherent babble.

By preventing comment, you prevent this process from taking place and raise the meaning/noise ratio.

This idea of deliberate deafness is the main idea that anyone wishing to reform TEC will have to tackle, by whichever media.

The media used to is important, and can be termed as “working smart” vs. working hard. The better technology wins the battle, just ask military men.

However, I think that in order to effect change, you must get at this deliberate deafness. It is scary for people to admit that what they support, and are identified with is rotten. This goes to the core of their being. They would much, much rather be deaf, and not acknowledge that TEC is a rotten institution, and just continue to say, “Everything is ok at my parish. I can’t control what the ding dongs at 815 do.” They know, deep down, that something is wrong, and some know that something is very wrong. But, they would rather not suffer the hurt of admitting that they are aligned with something rotten. They are very human in this way. We have to give them ways that allow them to acknowledge this, and then give them alternatives. We cannot depend on change coming because it costs too much internally for most pew sitters. We have to show them ways that they can give themselves an out. That is good marketing. I see it all the time when people can’t sell an investment because they have to admit that buying it was a mistake, for whatever reason. If you give them an out, psychologically speaking, then they will accept it as an honest mistake, and can forgive themselves, and sell the old and go to the new.

Now, there are some that like the rot, and believe in the rot, and they are most active in the attempt to coopt the church for their narrow political needs.

Excellent thoughts, Greg! I’ve enjoyed mulling over the whole paradigm shift, and was able to steer a young college grad who is spending a year in Morocco studying the dual threads of religion and women’s rights (for a book) to Clay Shirky. We got into a conversation about her thesis of how changes in media have changed the ability of oppressive governments to keep information in or out, and she’d never heard of him.

[5] Greg, I’ve noticed that there are no comments on the Youtube Site on any of the videos. One had a comment, but it was removed. Hmm… Could it be that dialogue is not really welcome? Is dialogue a way of saying, listen to us until you understand?

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