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It's a little odd that the article focuses on "american" christianity. Don't these pages have global audiences? A lot of the "truth crisis" of online media rel

by netcan 5y ago

It's a little odd that the article focuses on "american" christianity. Don't these pages have global audiences? A lot of the "truth crisis" of online media relates to online media usage of the "invisible half." Facebook went orbital around the same time that the internet went universal. Smartphones made the internet available to all those people who hadn't been using it in the 1990s & 2000s. Around 2010, your uncle Dave got his first smartphone and started blasting hourly messages from mafia wars achievements. The average Angela & Gabriel from Manilla got connected to free, Facebook-only internet. No one pays much attention to the laggards directly. I mean, they are noticeable in FBs DAUs, amazon's gross sales and such. They're just rarely noticed as disaggregated people. Facebook, or any distant tech company, has no idea what kind of impact they are have on this vast sea of people. Billions of people go from non computer users to using their smartphones for their media and communications, and no one close to Zuck speaks the language or has any idea what's going on. We learn in retrospect. For most of the arab spring, social media was the official headquarters of dozens of active rebels, revolutionaries, political movements and everything in between. They had recruited armies on social media before the companies paid much attention to it. Trump, Brexit, most political events of the last decade have been heavily tied to this phenomenon. It will keep happening. Consider this. The current religious makeup of the world is the legacy of various religious explosions where a belief system "went viral," one way or another. From now on, this happens online. The next vatican will be built in Zuck's front yard. From his perspective, he'll just discover one day that facebook now hosts the world's largest religion.

pjc50 5y ago
The way I phrase this is that Twitter is a revolutionary technology: it'll give your country a revolution whether it needs it or not.
- netcan 5y ago
  Kind of agree, but I think it should be twitter, not FB. Twitter is inherently more "revolutionary" in aesthetics. Lots of politics, shrill arguments and such. It's also popular among journalists, politicians, and such. It represents a relatively elite user base. FB is the populist social media site. Your Uncle who never had a computer until he got a smartphone in 2013, he's a facebook user. The fisherman who got a smartphone before home electricity, he's a facebook user. The dichotomy isn't necessarily FB-Twitter, but a lot of social media's political stuff in the west (Brexit, Trump...) has come from the non elite parts of social media. It was neither mainstream nor fringe, which hints at the populism of it. Religion is a great candidate for revolution. Major power shifts could happen in broad daylight and journalists, politicians and social media execs probably wouldn't even notice.
OliverJones 5y ago
There's a strong strain of (bogus) piety in conservative American Christianity that thrives on pages, sites, and media branded as Christian. "Wow, I can get my ticket punched for the stairway to heaven just by visiting the Jesus Is Lord page? Cool." It's weaker in other countries. At any rate, it started out weaker. So this sort of trolling is, in the early 21st century, peculiarly successful at targeting Americans. In that way it's similar to the televangelism craze of the late 20th century. Like televangelism, it is spreading globally. FB should pay these trolls. They're a huge boost to FB's "engagement" business model. There's nothing to be done about it except mass boycotts (account cancellation) of FB. Clergy and other church leaders could try, if they got organized, to drive such boycotts. But they won't; FB is too convenient. Similar analysis applies also to targeting of Black communities, in which church leaders are big offline influencers.
- netcan 5y ago
  IDK... There's a strong strain of "cat-pictureiness" to the internet... always has been. Most of us indulge in it, in one sense or another. If people are christian, and they're in vapid cat picture mode... these sites might grab their attention. Social media is a niche finding, attention grabbing device. There's no mystery in how these got so many people's attention. The question is what is being done with their attention. Most likely it's just selling them stuff. Most likely. A more unlikely, but also more worrying scenario is that some scheiter has suddenly become a messiah with 100m followers because FB algorithms accidentally did it. I mean, people will do these sorts of things. But, if Zuck does it accidentally for cheese... I will be mad with him. ISIS was bad enough.

by netcan 5y ago

pjc50 5y ago

The way I phrase this is that Twitter is a revolutionary technology: it'll give your country a revolution whether it needs it or not.

netcan 5y ago
Kind of agree, but I think it should be twitter, not FB. Twitter is inherently more "revolutionary" in aesthetics. Lots of politics, shrill arguments and such. It's also popular among journalists, politicians, and such. It represents a relatively elite user base. FB is the populist social media site. Your Uncle who never had a computer until he got a smartphone in 2013, he's a facebook user. The fisherman who got a smartphone before home electricity, he's a facebook user. The dichotomy isn't necessarily FB-Twitter, but a lot of social media's political stuff in the west (Brexit, Trump...) has come from the non elite parts of social media. It was neither mainstream nor fringe, which hints at the populism of it. Religion is a great candidate for revolution. Major power shifts could happen in broad daylight and journalists, politicians and social media execs probably wouldn't even notice.

OliverJones 5y ago

There's a strong strain of (bogus) piety in conservative American Christianity that thrives on pages, sites, and media branded as Christian. "Wow, I can get my ticket punched for the stairway to heaven just by visiting the Jesus Is Lord page? Cool." It's weaker in other countries. At any rate, it started out weaker. So this sort of trolling is, in the early 21st century, peculiarly successful at targeting Americans. In that way it's similar to the televangelism craze of the late 20th century. Like televangelism, it is spreading globally. FB should pay these trolls. They're a huge boost to FB's "engagement" business model. There's nothing to be done about it except mass boycotts (account cancellation) of FB. Clergy and other church leaders could try, if they got organized, to drive such boycotts. But they won't; FB is too convenient. Similar analysis applies also to targeting of Black communities, in which church leaders are big offline influencers.

netcan 5y ago
IDK... There's a strong strain of "cat-pictureiness" to the internet... always has been. Most of us indulge in it, in one sense or another. If people are christian, and they're in vapid cat picture mode... these sites might grab their attention. Social media is a niche finding, attention grabbing device. There's no mystery in how these got so many people's attention. The question is what is being done with their attention. Most likely it's just selling them stuff. Most likely. A more unlikely, but also more worrying scenario is that some scheiter has suddenly become a messiah with 100m followers because FB algorithms accidentally did it. I mean, people will do these sorts of things. But, if Zuck does it accidentally for cheese... I will be mad with him. ISIS was bad enough.