Steve Inskeep, who seems to want to channel a late-teens id in his approach to interviewing (…”wait a minute!” he often says before launching into a clarification that turns out to be a sophomoric review of the bloody obvious…) was in pretty bad form in his interview of Ayad Akhtar, author of a new book titled “Midwestern Dervish.” I haven’t read the book, but it appears to be an account of the experience of a young Muslim American making his way in the Midwest, and experiencing all the complex and layered implications of living at a cultural and religious crossroads in the era of globalization.

Nuance was too much for Inskeep, though, as he made a range of gaffs. Instead of calling Atkhar’s protagonist a “Muslim American,” he became “…a young Muslim living in America….” Then, in Inskeep’s view, Islam does not come off looking very good. His evidence: a character is divorced in Pakistan by the traditional means, and some characters in the book are anti-semitic.

The interview lacked the sophistication we have a right to expect from our flagship news source. Too bad.

I’d like to read the book

The problem is Aliaa Elmahjdy inserted or re-inserted a striking and functionally transgressive gesture. The effects are unfolding. Moderate forces in Egypt seem nearly as troubled by her act as conservatives because of what it can be interpreted (by conservatives) to symbolize about the dangers of Western and non-Islamic influence in the political legacies of the Spring. Conservatives, of course, are scandalized (part of what she no doubt had in mind). We should also not forget that both Elmahdy and the conservatives well understand the iconic nature of Egypt across the MENA region. For both, this is an issue of aspiration—will Egypt rise to its new role, and will that role be as an instantiation of tradition or an instantiation of a new, progressive, and modernist Islamic world?

I should note, though, that besides the “moderate” and “conservative” voices, feminist voices have also weighed in, some in strong support.

What I want to draw attention to is that this can be described as a question of which “cultural geography” her act imagines. She was clearly focused on the geography of a global youth culture encouraged and enabled by digital networks. But her posting flowed into–and will now become important in–another cultural geography, that of on-the-ground politics in Egypt. Such “clashes of geography” are clearly an emerging and developing function of the substantive and generative capacities of digital cultures.

This was the ninth in a series of meetings that bring together leading ecclesial and theological leaders from the Abrahamic faiths for a period of interaction and network-building.  I must begin my saying that I wholeheartedly endorse and support this project.  I could not have been more impressed with the commitment of these speakers to a future of understanding and of moderate, even liberal values in relation to religion and moral and political culture.  Anything I say here is intended to help pursue the project at the center of the ninth meeting: understanding how digital and social media might be implicated in interfaith relations and issues.

The theme of this meeting was clearly motivated by the experience of the “Arab Spring” and the demonstrations in Iran in prior years.  Discourse about this, and particularly about the situation in Egypt, dominated the meeting.  The input from Egypt was particularly interesting, stimulating, and fascinating.  It is clear that a new day has dawned for many in the region. All expect a bumpy road ahead, but something important has changed, in their view.

There were several things in the background of these conversations that conditioned the discourse in significant ways.  The first was that the dominant voices in the room were ecclesial or theological or both.  Thus, the paradigms, categories of conversation, and issues, reflected their concerns.  The second was the pervasive and determinative effect of demographics. The question of digital and social media is—almost by definition—a generational discourse. This was, simply, not the digital generation, or really anywhere near it.  Speaker after speaker, and person after person I spoke with around the edges, would say something like, “…I really don’t know much about social media—so I asked my kids….”

It was fascinating to realize that this one of the things the three faiths had the most in common—at least in this context—was their approach to accounting for digital media. All chose to look at the digital in similar ways, focusing on the morality and ethics of these media in a clearly instrumentalist frame, something I address in more detail in the following “myths.”  There was also a gender cast to some of the presentations and—particularly—the questions and responses from the floor.  Simply put, women among the presenters and questioners seemed to have more generative ideas about the digital and social media and about the processes of social change for which they would be relevant.

So, there was a dominant framing to the discourse.  This is a limiting factor in that, for those in the non-social/digital media “generations” and cohorts, what they know is what they read in the press about what digital and social media are and how they work.  And the press have their own ways of interpreting these things. So, what is generally known of digital and social media are the negative and lurid things about which we can have moral panics, or in the case of the Arab Spring, things we want to celebrate.  What happens is that moral leaders such as those speaking at Doha can say only the most generic things about these media, applying generic notions of the good and right and just to uses of the digital and social media that they know only second-hand.  And typically, these are generic ideas that are assumed to apply to all of digital media when they are only relevant to specific uses and cases and not beyond.

I was not invited to give a formal presentation.  At the risk of hubris, I thought this was a bit of a loss as I was the one person present who had actually done some research on religion and digital media.  Instead, I engaged in many conversations and interventions “around the edges.”   I met many fine people, did some valuable networking, and learned a lot.  Tellingly, perhaps, many of the most interesting conversations I had were with younger participants, most of whom “got it” in ways many (but not all) of the formal presentations did not.  In fairness, in fact, I should stipulate that a few of the main speakers spoke with some sophistication about digital media.  They were the notable exceptions.

It is important to focus on the larger picture because of what it tells us about the challenges that established religious authorities face in coming to terms with the substantial changes that contemporary forms of media and mediation are bringing about.  In the main, in the plenary presentations, I heard three separate and distinct discourses related to interfaith dialogue and digital media: 1) Discussions of ethics and ethical principles; 2) Discussions of the processes and practices of dialogue; and 3) Discussions focused on technologies.  These three discourses must be brought together if progress is to be made in understanding the role of digital media in religious understanding.  It can’t just be about dialogue, it must also contemplate ethics and digital media. It can’t just be about ethics, it must take account of digital media and the challenges of dialogue, and of course, it can’t just be about media technologies, it must also be about how to bring ethically-informed and ethically-relevant dialogue to bear in and through these media.

With this project in mind, I present ten “myths” about religion and digital/social media I heard at Doha along with a brief discussion of each.

Myth one: that the social media are equivalent to the journalism of the “legacy” media.  Speaker after speaker talked about social and digital media as though they were just a new iteration of earlier media.  The difference with social media was thought to be that they could simply be somehow deployed instrumentally in the service of dialogue.  The idea seemed to be that since they are interactive and networked, we could extend a presumed instrumentalism (that is actually not typical of journalism, either) to these media, replacing journalistic framing with an aspired deployment in a kind of enforced interactivity.

Myth two: it is possible to “assign” a responsibility to the social media.  Several speakers talked of the expectations we might have of media in relation to dialogue and understanding.  It is laudable—even vital—that social media and digital media be brought into this project. The problem is that it was never possible for moral authority to make journalism do its bidding.  Religion resists such expectations.  But at least with the legacy media, it might be possible for channels to be directed or controlled.  This is much less technically possible with digital media.  But, more than that, digital media practice absolutely resists the ideal of control or direction.

Myth three: the Internet is neutral. It is a technology with no inherent values, conditions, or framings—an empty vessel, ready to be deployed for good or ill.  For some theological voices, it was described as a gift from God, destined to be deployed for good if used in ways consistent with faith.  For those more focused on moral issues, this idea of neutrality supported a focus on evil and virtue in relation to larger questions of politics and purpose.

Myth four: dialogue happens offline, with online activity ideally only supporting it.  This functioned, I think, to reserve authority over dialogue to an expert discourse such as that represented in dialogue projects such as at Doha.  Dialogue was thought of as something hermetic.  It has its own normativity, its own purposes and its own outcomes, significant in particular and defined contexts and put to particular and defined purposes.  As contradictory as it sounds, it was hard for these voices to conceive of online interactivity as having the capacity to be a context of dialogue, or even authentic interaction.  This was not, of course, all about authority.  There was also the widely-shared assumption that it is the physical encounter that is essential, and that that physical encounter, along with its motivations, subjectivities, and conditions, pre-dates the digital, and can expect certain things from the digital encounter.

Myth Five:  That the Arab Spring was “caused” by the digital media/that the Arab Spring was not “caused” by the digital media.  While many pointed out that we can explain this phenomenon best as a complex of causes, with digital media playing a role, there were still frequent references to its role on the one hand and attempts to discount it in a “straw man” argument on the other.

Myth Six:  Dialogue must have rules.  This derived, I think, from the long-standing tenure of conversations (at Doha and elsewhere) about dialogue.  Dialogue about dialogue necessarily involves a great deal of rumination on the nature of the process.  There are of course expert literatures (in a number of fields) that are relevant to this discourse and that help reinforce the idea that one of the keys to successful dialogue is “doing it right.”  What this fails to conceive is that there might be contexts of dialogue—now made possible by the cross-national and cross-cultural capacities of digital media—that might be taking place outside the legitimating capacities of expert systems.

Myth Seven: That there is—or should be—one unitary context of dialogue…at least that a normative model of dialogue should be determinative and broadly felt.  For most such voices, something approximating the Habermasian public sphere seemed to be what they had in mind, with all of its problems and contradictions in tact.  There was no sense that a set of such spheres might be involved, separately constituted through the abilities of contemporary cultures to constitute their own bases and boundaries through emerging processes and practices of communication.

Myth Eight: And this one is from the most prominent American Christian leader, Jesse Jackson: “…Social media can keep us connected but not directed….”  He was merely articulating an idea that is behind a number of the myths, that these media are at best neutral, that they have no particular role in forming and shaping practice, meaning, or function.  There is much reason to think that, in fact, social media can and do “direct,” in that they encourage unique practices and sensibilities that have senses of trajectory or momentum. For example, the subjectivity of interactivity implicit in digital practice carries both the capacity for connection and the implication that an ethic of connection and dialogue is at least implicated, and that connection and dialogue must be about something.  It is not an empty instrument waiting to be filled by normative content from “somewhere else.”

Myth Nine: Social media divide, not unite.  There was a great deal of concern about how digital and social media seem to be about small, focused, and perhaps solipsistic networks and senses of community.  They were widely said to be individualistic, self-absorbed, and atomistic.  This assumption—instantiated by second-hand senses of what these media do—overlooks the possibility that such supposedly narrow discursive communities might at the same time be deep, rich, and engaged, and that they might serve to form wider interactive networks among themselves, and that they might even broaden their effectivity by attracting new communities based on their refined and focused articulations and interactions.

Myth Ten: That social networking and social media don’t convey “primary religious narratives.”  This is of a piece with myth four, that the real, normative formations and meaning-makings take place offline, and that the online is merely ancillary or otherwise is instrumentally related to the real stuff taking place elsewhere.

One thing all of these myths have in common is their tendency to evaluate the role of social media in discontinuity and instrumentally, rather than in continuity with lived life IRL.  It is thus seemed necessary, conceptually, to think of them as “neutral” in some way, as I have said.

The problem is that these media are not neutral.  Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian “martyr” whose act of desperation launched the Arab Spring, was salient in part because he represented the shared narrative of the aspirations and frustrations of a generation.  Youth throughout the world could identify with his story and the frustration represented by his act, and the way the story was disseminated: in their media, instantaneously and globally and obviously beyond the control of settled authority.  This complex gave the story legitimacy and explanatory power.  There are necessary affordances to these media. They resist control and determination and authority.  They instantiate the social sanction of exposure and opprobrium (the central function of journalism) but they do so in ways that engage sensibilities and sentiments in new and powerful and determinative ways.

The digital and social media represent real capacities to engage and articulate the project of interfaith understanding and dialogue.  They must be part of this project, in fact.  But a lot of conceptual and practical work remains to bring the digital and social media together with what has been learned through the disciplines and processes of interfaith dialogue.  The Doha conference was a start but only a start.

Nidhal Guessoum also attended, and posted a reflection on Huffington Post.   Worth a look.

Its a bit more complicated than that, and evidence of some sophisticated thinking in the Executive Branch–perhaps.  We need to remember that the local news audience, in aggregate, is the national audience.  It totals more than three times the audience for the national network news, and more than ten times the cable news audience.

So what it thinks and how it handles national news matters. And no one studies it. We have no idea how national politics figure in its voice.  We do know it does cover national news, and I think studies are sorely needed of how local anchors handle the big national stories.

My anecdotal observations lead me to suspect that they introduce a note of skepticism and mediation as they do. But we simply don’t  know.  But its not simply a matter of the White House seeking to bypass the more responsible and critical national correspondents, though it is clearly partly that.

But is this another “net delusion?”  Are we making too much of the role of these technologies?  It is worth considering, but a particular articulation of skepticism caught my eye.  On the January 28 Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC) Richard Engel made it surprisingly categorical:

I’ve been listening to a lot of analysts and have been plugged in over this. Keep talking about Twitter and Facebook. This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook.

Engel, a real old Egypt hand, fluent in Arabic, had a valid point that the real causes of such events are people’s felt needs and political and social situations.

But the rhetorical moment here is telling.  Who would claim that something like social media could move people to action irrespective of real social and political conditions?

I have noted in other contexts a tendency for media people (particularly journalists) to over-expect and over-determine media power.  This may be related to their own subjective experience within the media.  There is an assumption of agency at the core of journalism, and it is possible that some journalists have a hard time thinking of media “effects” in other than the most instrumental “strong media terms.”  So, for Engel, was it that he simply couldn’t conceive of Facebook and Twitter (or other media) efficacy outside of a very instrumentalist framework?

He, himself went on to a rather nuanced and sophisticated description of the role he saw for these media practices:

Now, the protests and the Twitter and all the social networking stuff helps. It helps inspire people, coordinate, but that’s not why they’re out. They’re out because of mismanagement and a system that is really gotten so far away from its people.

The complexity and subtlety of mediations of experience and social action–such as that he describes–is the sort of material and the sort of perspective that critical media scholarship wishes to bring to bear.  Many media scholars lament the lack of a substantive dialogue between journalists and scholars of media about the way these things work.  Such a conversation might well help us to a broader and more substantive appreciation of how these things are working in a moment of great social change.

Public information and public discourse deserves better than arch and categorical binaries (“the social media are powerful” vs “they play no role”).

Blow’s intent was to reflect on the whole area of doubt, and the fact that he, younger people, and many others, are now feeling increasingly emboldened to declare themselves “undecided” in the area of religion.  In recent studies, that category, the “nones,” is now over 16%.  As he points out, it doesn’t mean they are all Atheists or Agnostics.  As my language indicates, I think it is more a matter of social conformism (or social non-conformism in this case) than it is a case of active identity as a resistor to religion of some kind.  No matter what it is, it is important, and a measure of whatever processes of “secularization” may be underway today.

Blow notes that, for those seeking elective office, it isn’t possible to officially “non-believe.”  Instead, there is the widely-shared assumption that, no matter what the formal identification for political purposes, many public figures don’t really care that much about formal faith.  Many (including me) have their doubts about Ronald Reagan, but he’s an example of where it didn’t matter very much to many of the conservative faithful (those who presumably should care the most).  The converse was true with Clinton,  who seemed pretty objectively religions, but for whom his religious bona fides were not widely accepted in those sectors of the electorate who are themselves most “religious.”

Lots of big questions here, worthy of careful discussion, and very under-represented in journalism about politics.  What does it mean to say you have a faith?  Should it matter?  To whom does it matter?  Is it really a “private” or “personal” matter when it seems so important that political figures have a faith of some kind?

The graphic that accompanied the Blow piece opens an even more intriguing and perhaps profound issue.  That is the stunning increase in the number of Catholics serving in Congress.  By far the largest increase and the largest number.

There has been some commentary about the parallel phenomenon on the Supreme Court. American Catholics have clearly long since  passed into the mainstream, by these measures.  It goes without saying that that is a good thing.

But, combined with our relative lack of a robust, consensual public discourse of religion, one wonders.

Because we can’t talk about it (its private, remember?) we can’t find common languages of it in relation to politics and public purpose. So, we have no idea whether and how this matters, and our news media and our pundits are not helping us figure it all out.

I point to it because it is such an interesting topic and contains some compelling and enlightening stories…

First came the mention in Monday’s New York Times, in a review of the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” of the fact that the combined audience for cable news is small.  In aggregate, it is typically in the 5 million range (there are, of course, bumps at major news events, like Tuesday’s election).  But, as the Times’s writer pointed out, its usually less than 2% of the population watching.  Then, on Wednesday night, Jon Stewart’s guest was Fox News’s Chris Wallace.  In discussing coverage of the election, Wallace pointed out–as other Fox hosts often do–that the total Fox News audience Tuesday night was larger than the combined audiences of CNN and MSNBC.  In fairness, I should point out that the other two play the same game, working hard to find ways to nuance their audience figures to show impressively large figures.

But I found  myself saying, in response to Wallace: “…exactly what difference does that make?”  What does it mean that Fox’s audience is larger than MSNBC’s?  Is it some sort of measure of the political winds?  Surely not, as Fox also won the ratings war in 2008 when it was the Republicans who took the “shellacking.”

So, what does it mean?  My liberal friends have always liked to say that the relative size of the conservative-talk audience is a measure of the superficiality of conservative ideas.  Liberals–we like to think–engage in ideas and rhetorics that are not amenable to articulation in a tabloid format.  So, naturally, conservative audiences for talk radio and cable news will be larger.  As a media scholar, I’d point out that there is a more persuasive class/genre explanation that is arguable as well. That is that lower-SES audiences have always been more attracted to tabloid news–think about its roots in the newspaper industry–and one thing Fox is good at is tabloid news.  They can do a human-interest, or kid/dog or killer bees story better than anyone.  CNN and MSNBC try to stay above that fray, and one of the affects might be the attraction of taste cultures among their audiences that are correlated with political leanings.

But, back to the audience-size question.  I may be more sensitive to this than many of my colleagues in the media studies field because of my long-ago work on Televangelism.  The parallels between the way cable-news proponents tout audiences and the way Televangelists did are striking.  I authored a fairly definitive journal article on this (my first refereed single-author work) way back then, and I think it is time I dug that out and looked again at the whole question in relation to the influence of Cable News in public discourse.

As regular readers will recall, I think this is important because Cable News is far from the most dominant source of television news in America.  First is probably local news, followed by network news.  Still.  But even that raises important questions about influence.

I intend to work on this.  Soon.

One of my favorite signs at the rally

I was in Baltimore already for a conference, and decided I just has to go and be part of the event.  I wanted to see what it was like, but I’ll also admit to wanting to identify with the sentiment behind it. So much of the political rhetoric this year is about anger, and rejection, and complaint, and whining, and not understanding….

I wanted to identify with  a movement that was about the opposite of those things. The U.S. is a mature democracy now, right?  Shouldn’t we be able to be democratic in mature ways?

As a media scholar, the thing that has intrigued me the most about the rally was how thoroughly the mainstream and cable media simply did not “get it.”  For starters, there was a lot of irony, and today’s pundit-rich, self important and risk-averse media can be excused for not really understanding that.  but when they also couldn’t understand Jon Stewart’s point in criticizing cable news for its sins, that is evidence of a failure of intellect and imagination.  We should be able to expect more of our media.

An example.  In today’s New York Times, media commentator David Carr delivered a particularly disappointing critique of Stewart’s cable-news critique.  Under the title “Rally to Shift the Blame,” Carr criticizes Stewart for missing the point that most Americans don’t watch cable news.

Noting (for the first time I can recall in the MSM) that only about 2% of the American population watches cable news, Carr suggests that Stewart should have addressed the real issues of politics.

This is so typical of media myopia about their own position, framing practice, and the specific issue of the role of cable news in setting the news agenda.  Sure the cable news audience is small.  I’ve blogged on that point in the past.  But that’s beside the point.  The point is that Carr’s colleagues in the punditocracy echo chamber treat cable news as the place that sets the political talking points agenda.  It has influence well beyond its small audience because the rest of the media grant it that influence.  Jon Stewart didn’t make that up.

A missed opportunity…