Pope Benedict XVI told Catholic bloggers and Facebook and YouTube users Monday to be respectful of others when spreading the Gospel online and not to see their ultimate goal as getting as many online hits as possible.
In his annual message for the church’s World Day of Social Communications, Benedict called for the faithful to adopt a “Christian style presence” online that is responsible, honest and discreet.

“We must be aware that the truth which we long to share does not derive its worth from its ‘popularity’ or from the amount of attention it receives,” Benedict wrote. “The proclamation of the Gospel requires a communication which is at once respectful and sensitive.”

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When I knelt before Bishop Porteus, I doubt that anyone in that congregation, myself included, could have imagined that:

1. There would be a woman Presiding Bishop (who will be in here Feb. 4-6, by the way),
2. There would be gay and lesbian bishops,
3. Any Episcopalian would ever dream of defecting to an African Anglican Church,
4. There would be such a movement as the “Emergent” Church,

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Mr. [Bobby] Maldonado, 26, is one of the dozens of young aides throughout the city who rise before dawn to pore over the news to synthesize it, summarize it and spin it, so their bosses start the day well-prepared. Washington is a city that traffics in information, and as these 20-something staff members are learning, who knows what ”” and when they know it ”” can be the difference between professional advancement and barely scraping by.

“Information is the capital market of Washington, so you know something that other people don’t know and you know something earlier than other people know it is a formulation for increasing your status and power,” said David Perlmutter, the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. “So any edge you can use to get stuff faster, earlier, better or exclusively is very important.”

For Mr. Maldonado, who said that “the information wars are won before work,” that means rising early to browse all of the major newspapers, new polling data, ideological Web sites and dozens of news alerts needed to equip his bosses with the best, most up-to-date nuggets.

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It appears “social media” is living up to its name. At least that’s the conclusion of a national survey released today.

“On one level, I think these findings sort of push against the notion that heavy technology users are retreating from real engagement with groups and real involvement in social life,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Washington, D.C.- based Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

The image of social loner sitting in the glow of a laptop screen is dashed by the survey, which was conducted by telephone from Nov. 23 through Dec. 21, 2010 by Princeton Survey Research Associates International.

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However, this is only one ”“ misleading ”“ side of the story. There are moments ”“ moments of crisis for the hegemonic discourse ”“ when one should take the risk of provoking the disintegration of appearances. Such a moment was described by the young Marx in 1843. In ”˜Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, he diagnosed the decay of the German ancien regime in the 1830s and 1840s as a farcical”‹ repetition of the tragic fall of the French ancien regime. The French regime was tragic ”˜as long as it believed and had to believe in its own justification’. The German regime ”˜only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world imagine the same thing. If it believed in its own essence, would it ”¦ seek refuge in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien regime is rather only the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead.’ In such a situation, shame is a weapon: ”˜The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicising it.’

This is precisely our situation today: we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on. Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame ”“ our shame for tolerating such power over us ”“ is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.

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Although the sciences are heavily represented among Mr. Brockman’s contributors, the volume ranges beyond the usual suspects (e.g., the ubiquitous technology booster Clay Shirky) to include visual artists, architects and musicians whose voices are all too often missing from discussions of technology and contemporary culture.

Whether poets or programmers, the book’s contributors write from the perspective not of “digital natives” but of creatures from an earlier age who have had to adapt to the changes wrought by the Internet. As members of a transitional generation, they are poised to address both practical and philosophical themes.

Most of the contributors are enthusiastic about the bounty that the Internet provides, particularly to scientific research, global communication and personal expression. Indeed, several contributors are disparaging of those who question the Internet’s costs, dismissing such people as “neophobic” or “curmudgeons and troglodytes.” Still, a few writers belie such easy caricature. The neuroscientist Joshua Greene suggests, in a blunt but apt metaphor, that the Internet, for all its revolutionary pretense, is “nothing more, and nothing less, than a very useful, and very dumb, butler.”

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When Gretchen Baxter gets home from work as a New York City book editor, she checks her BlackBerry at the door.

“I think we are attached to these devices in a way that is not always positive,” says Baxter, who’d rather focus at home on her husband and 12-year-old daughter. “It’s there and it beckons. That’s human nature (but) ”¦ we kind of get crazy sometimes and we don’t know where it should stop.”
Americans are connected at unprecedented levels ”” 93% now use cellphones or wireless devices; one-third of those are “smartphones” that allow users to browse the Web and check e-mail, among other things. The benefits are obvious: checking messages on the road, staying in touch with friends and family, efficiently using time once spent waiting around.

The downside: Often, we’re effectively disconnecting from those in the same room.

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1. Is youth ministry killing the church? by Kate Murphy (February 4)
I’ve always met young Christians through youth programs. I’ve been hired by churches that expect regular events created exclusively to minister to young people. But I wonder now if we’re ministering them right out of the church.

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Canadians spend more time online than users in any of the countries tracked by measurement company comScore, which also said Canada had the highest penetration of Internet access. About 68 per cent of the Canadian population is online, comScore estimated in April, compared to 62 per cent in France and the United Kingdom, 60 per cent in Germany, 59 per cent in the United States, 57 per cent in Japan, and 36 per cent in Italy.

Canada was the only country in which users logged an average of more than 2,500 minutes online a month, which is almost 42 hours. Israel was second with an average of around 2,300 minutes, while a few other countries were around the 2,000-minute mark.

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Social media…, Web 2.0, is far more interactive. A blogger says something in her post; I respond with a comment, someone else chimes in. I post a link to a website on my Facebook page; someone comments on it, and the conversation continues. Someone makes a video about how a church might be more welcoming; someone else makes another, and posts it as a video response on the original video’s YouTube page, and the comments weigh the pros and cons of each approach.

If the question facing us is only, “How does social media form a part of the marketing strategy of the church?” then the suspicion and concern with which it is clearly viewed by some is understandable. (Mostly this criticism is from those who are not themselves participants in that world, and it is unclear to me whether the lack of participation bred the suspicion or vice versa.) Social media is free flowing, radically democratic, unpredictable, impossible to control. In this sense, it is far more like the children’s talk than the sermon, more a conversation than a professorial lecture. More the realm of the Holy Spirit, one might say, than the purview of the levitical priesthood.

The social norms in our culture are known to most of the members of that culture. We don’t, for the most part, say hurtful or abusive things to one another. We respect one another’s points of view, even when we disagree. These norms, for the most part, also exist in the online world. Perhaps without the element of face-to-face connection, it is easier for some to breach those norms, but we all know of people who simply seem unable to cope with externally imposed norms regardless of context.

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Christians and atheists are fighting again””this time over who can raise more money for charity.

The Christian and atheist communities on the online forum Reddit are in a battle to raise the most money for their causes. In the spirit of Christmas (or in atheists’ case, human generosity), community members are even donating money to each other’s groups.

The Reddit.com social networking site allows users to rate the popularity of various websites, as well as join like-minded communities, including groups like reddit.com/r/christianity and reddit.com/r/Atheism.

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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

With Facebook, [Mark] Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook””if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large””this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.
Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed””and been ashamed of noticing””that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?

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Considering that you couldn’t turn on your TV, go to the movies or hit the bookstore this year without seeing Mark Zuckerberg, it’s absolutely fitting that the 26-year-old founder of Facebook was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.”

At the same time it’s astonishing that, at such an early stage of his career, Zuckerberg finds himself on the receiving end of an honor that places him in some remarkable company.

He is the second-youngest to receive the nod, edged out only by 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh in 1927. He becomes only the second recipient from Silicon Valley, following Andy Grove in 1997 — who was honored almost 30 years after founding Intel. Among other tech titans, the list is a short one: Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com in 1999 and Bill Gates in 2005 (though for his charitable works).

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Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, likes to say that his Web site brings people together, helping to make the world a better place. But Facebook isn’t a utopia, and when it comes up short, Dave Willner tries to clean up.

Dressed in Facebook’s quasi-official uniform of jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, the 26-year-old Mr. Willner hardly looks like a cop on the beat. Yet he and his colleagues on Facebook’s “hate and harassment team” are part of a virtual police squad charged with taking down content that is illegal or violates Facebook’s terms of service. That puts them on the front line of the debate over free speech on the Internet.

That role came into sharp focus last week as the controversy about WikiLeaks boiled over on the Web, with coordinated attacks on major corporate and government sites perceived to be hostile to that group.

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As every avid Twitter user knows, there are only 140 characters in a “tweet” and that includes the empty spaces.

The bishops gathered at the ancient Council of Nicea didn’t face that kind of communications challenge and, thus, produced an old-fashioned creed that in English is at least 1,161 characters long.

No wonder so many of the gray-haired administrators in black suits in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops struggle with life online.

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Ninth grade was supposed to be a fresh start for Marie’s son: new school, new children. Yet by last October, he had become withdrawn. Marie prodded. And prodded again. Finally, he told her.

“The kids say I’m saying all these nasty things about them on Facebook,” he said. “They don’t believe me when I tell them I’m not on Facebook.”

But apparently, he was.

Marie, a medical technologist and single mother who lives in Newburyport, Mass., searched Facebook. There she found what seemed to be her son’s page: his name, a photo of him grinning while running ”” and, on his public wall, sneering comments about teenagers he scarcely knew.

Someone had forged his identity online and was bullying others in his name….

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Social networking is changing the American political scene and helping South Carolina politicians stay directly connected to the voters. Media experts say those who aren’t using such sites as Facebook and Twitter are missing out.

Gary Karr, a Washington, D.C-based public relations executive, one-time S.C. political reporter and press secretary for former Gov. David Beasley, said in the 1990s the political realm depended on snail mail, e-mails and media outlets to deliver messages. Today, officials can shape their reputations, control their message and get the word out to a big audience in real time.

“Everybody is their own media channel now,” Karr said.

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As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.

The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.”

That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power ”” and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States.

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Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook and the chief digital organizer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, knows a thing or two about building online communities.

Now he is applying his expertise to a new venture called Jumo, which aims to connect people with nonprofits and charitable organizations.

The site, which is being unveiled on Tuesday, aims to “do what Yelp did for restaurants,” Mr. Hughes said, indexing charities “to help people find and evaluate them.”

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Maybe money can’t buy happiness. But can it buy friendliness?

Columbia University is hoping it can. The Office of Residential Programs at the university, sensing that its campus had grown too introverted, this week has tried to encourage casual interactions among students with a game, called “The Social Experiment,” aimed at getting campus strangers to talk to each other. The winner gets $500.

Here’s how it works: Each day of the week all students on campus are given a random word as a prompt. A subset of students is assigned to keep one of several passwords, which they disclose to any student who addresses them with the prompt word. At the end of the week, the person who has collected the most passwords wins the cash. The idea is that in the process of foraging for passwords, seekers will be forced to interact with fellow students whom they do not know.

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In established democracies, the Internet has become a powerful political tool used for mobilizing, fundraising and advertising. The Internet has taken on an important but different role in emerging democracies, such as Malaysia, where its use has been essential in breaking a half-century old monopoly on power by the ruling coalition.

When mainstream media will not or cannot cover important political stories, many Malaysians click toward Malaysiakini, or Malaysia Now, the nation’s most popular news website.

The site attracts 300,000 visitors a day to its text and video content in English, Bahasa, Chinese and Tamil. The languages reflect the main ethnic groups of Malaysia’s 28 million people: roughly 54 percent ethnic Malays, 24 percent ethnic Chinese and 7 percent ethnic Indians.

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Facebook can lead married people astray, says the head of the Living Word Christian Fellowship Church in Neptune, N.J.

So, in his Sunday sermon, the Rev. Cedric A. Miller will announce that married church leaders have to log out for good, or get kicked out.

This thinking runs counter to churches that are embracing social media to reach their flocks.

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On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

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In what labor officials and lawyers view as a ground-breaking case involving workers and social media, the National Labor Relations Board has accused a company of illegally firing an employee after she criticized her supervisor on her Facebook page.

This is the first case in which the labor board has stepped in to argue that workers’ criticisms of their bosses or companies on a social networking site are generally a protected activity and that employers would be violating the law by punishing workers for such statements.

The labor relations board announced last week that it had filed a complaint against an ambulance service, American Medical Response of Connecticut, that fired an emergency medical technician, accusing her, among other things, of violating a policy that bars employees from depicting the company “in any way” on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.

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While much about what prompted Chesser’s transformation remains a mystery, he illustrates a growing phenomenon in the United States: young converts who embrace the most extreme interpretation of Islam.

Of the nearly 200 U.S. citizens arrested in the past nine years for terrorism-related activity, 20 to 25 percent have been converts, said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. More than a quarter have been arrested in the past 20 months. The center provided The Washington Post with saved copies of Chesser’s postings, most no longer available on the Web.

“Many of these converts are basically white kids from the suburbs” in search of a community, said Segal, whose group has produced numerous papers on those arrested, including Chesser. They are overwhelmingly male, frequently in their 20s and eager to “become something more than they are, or be part of something greater,” he said.

Their militancy is not a product of the alienation that has sometimes prompted Muslim-born young people in the United States and elsewhere to embrace extremism, particularly in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information””in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names””to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.

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It is curious, but the Web 2.0 industry has “robbed” from Christian language the model of communication it pursues: the community. And community is communion. The Church has created communities for 2,000 years. Now, the great marketing success on the Web 2.0 depends on the capacity to create “communities,” which later are reduced to groups of common interest to which it is possible to sell products of specialized announcers, who today are the ones who pay the most.

If, in communicating on the Internet the Church does so as Church-communion, if her “community” life is reflected on the Web, then she will also be able to build “community” on the Internet. For the surfer visiting her services, it will become something almost evident to enter into contact with the diocese’s closest reality, which can be his own parish, Caritas’ service, or the diocesan choir.

When a Church communicates on the Internet as communion, in community, the reality moves from being virtual to something real, as it puts the surfer in contact with the real life of the diocese, parish or community. And it is then that the greatest interactivity is achieved, when from the virtual reality one moves to “encounter,” which is, when all is said and done, what changes a person’s life.

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(Found here).

We write as Christian pastors who are privileged to serve as bishops of The Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Newark and in the Diocese of New Jersey in order to express our grief, alarm, compassion and outrage over the suicide of Tyler Clementi. We join our voices with the voices of all those concerned in Ridgewood, where Tyler grew up, at Rutgers University, where he was a freshman and across our nation. Another gay young person has died by suicide. This tragic loss of a promising life would appear to be directly related to an invasion of Tyler’s privacy and a violation of his personal life. Much remains to be considered by law enforcement authorities and the courts in order to determine whether this is also a case of bullying, a felony or a hate crime ”“ or a combination of the three. Whatever that legal determination may be, we join with other Christian and religious leaders, with the LGBT community and with all people of good will who take their stand against hatred, bigotry and bullying; against every expression of physical and verbal violence; and against any violation of the dignity of LGBT persons. When the rights of any ”“ especially the members of vulnerable groups who have so often been scapegoated ”“ are threatened, the rights of all are endangered.

We want to call attention to another, potentially deeper, issue here. It is the invasion of intimacy. Intimacy is a holy place within every human being; an innermost sanctuary where we develop our ultimate beliefs and values, nurture our closest relationships and maintain our deepest commitments. No one has the right to disclose that intimacy for someone else without consent. Such a violation is tantamount to the desecration of a sacred space. It is, in fact, a sacred space. It is the territory of the soul.
Technology, however, now provides tools to record, seize and disclose the most intimate matters of our lives without our consent. Identities can be stolen, hearts broken and lives shattered. Technology has placed powerful tools in human hands. Will they be used for building-up or for breaking down our neighbor? Tyler Clementi’s death certainly poses some important legal issues, but it also raises some critical moral concerns. Hubris has outstripped humility. And that is a serious problem. We can do better. We must do better, with God’s help.

In our Episcopal tradition, whenever we reaffirm our faith in worship, we are given a challenging question: “will you respect the dignity of every human being?” And we answer, “I will, with God’s help.” It is an important commitment. Whatever our religious tradition, we can agree on the need to respect one another’s dignity. With God’s help, we can stand together and stand up against bullies who would damage and destroy the lives of LGBT persons, their partners and families and friends. With God’s help, we can offer safety, support and sanctuary to all LGBT persons who are at risk. With God’s help, we can remind our society that every LGBT person is made in the image of God. The world needs our witness.

The Rt. Rev. Mark M. Beckwith, Bishop of Newark
The Rt. Rev. George E. Councell, Bishop of New Jersey

For nearly two weeks, many here on the Duke University campus had been aware of a certain senior “thesis” that a recent graduate wrote, apparently as a private joke, about her sexual exploits with 13 student-athletes.

Then the Internet seized on it….

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If you want to learn something about the impact of social media, you might try discerning fact from fiction in The Social Network, a new movie that purports to tell the story of how Facebook came into existence.

But if what you’re looking for is a quick primer on the real-life impact that social media have had on our society, you don’t have to spend two hours in a dark theater surrounded by people who may not be your (Facebook) friends. Just type the names “Tyler Clementi” and “Anthony Graber” into a search engine.

What happened to Clementi and Graber is a troubling commentary on an individual’s expectation of privacy in a world overrun by technology that all too often peers behind the curtains of our lives. But their stories also are proof of just how much social media have reinforced Marshall McLuhan’s prophesy that “the medium is the message.”

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