Faiths & Globalisation Initiative

In November, 2011, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation held several panels at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in San Francisco, California. Participants from the Faith & Globalisation and beyond presented their research on various issues. In this first instalment of our blog series from the America Academy of Religion, we look at the presentation offered by Professor Heidi Campbell.

Summary

During her presentation, Professor Heidi Campbell centered her remarks on a soon to be published paper titled, “Internet Domestication within Religious Bounded Communities: Strategic Negotiation of the Internet within Israeli Orthodox Communities,” co-authored by Oren Golan of Northwestern University.

The paper considers how the internet’s provision of instant connectivity, interactive access to diverse information sources, and the ability to transcend geographical and hierarchical boundaries is presenting challenges to ‘bounded communities’ – those groups that actively seek to distance themselves from others in order to maintain a cohesive identity.

The paper takes a close look at the example of how Israeli Orthodox communities are attempting to make the internet ‘kosher’ and the different strategies they have identified and utilized therein. Below is an abstract of the paper.

Internet Domestication within Religious Bounded Communities: Strategic Negotiation of the Internet within Israeli Orthodox Communities

Heidi Campbell, Texas A&M University & Oren Golan, Northwestern University

The internet has been lauded as a dynamic technology offering technical affordances such as instant connectivity, interactive access to diverse information sources, and the ability to transcend geographical and hierarchical boundaries. However, these same traits which are lauded as assets by many have been framed as dangerous threats by others. 

For those living in bounded communities that seek to maintain strict borders between themselves and mainstream society, the fluidity and pervasiveness of online communication challenges their attempts to limit interaction with those outside their communities. This is both an ideological and physical separation. For those living in bounded communities—such as fundamentalist groups and certain ethnic enclaves—maintaining moral, cultural, and social continuities is vital. This means avoiding traveling beyond community limits, encountering members of other cultures, or engaging with new sources of information.

This study explores the tensions faced by members of bounded communities in their negotiation with the internet. By bounded communities we refer to groups that actively seek to distance themselves from others in order to maintain a cohesive identity. These communities create separate cultural systems to maintain a specified rhythm or way of life. Thus their boundedness is both symbolic and integrated into their praxis. This enables us to consider how some groups resist the fluidity of networked relations and instead use technology to maintain closed social structures and solidify their unique identities. 

This investigation uses the theory of domestication to explore the choices made by group members about technology in light of communal boundaries. The domestication strategies are addressed through the following research question:

How do members of bounded communities domesticate the free-flowing information and social practices facilitated by the internet so that they are more in line with their communal boundaries?

By looking at webmasters affiliated with bounded communities, namely Orthodox Jewish groups in Israel, we explore how they domesticate contested aspects of the internet. Through adopting specific strategies they seek to create websites whose form and function affirm the boundaries of the offline groups with which they seek to maintain membership. These individuals function as gatekeepers, mediating the technology for their specific community. The logic of their online design and practice seeks to demonstrate to the wider community how the internet can be shaped as a “kosher” space.

Through investigating three Israeli Orthodox websites we demonstrate how offline structures influence online social and design practices of these sites, as well as the tensions which can emerge for bounded communities when their members create an online presence.  Thus webmasters from bounded groups are compelled to use bottom-up strategies to affirm their community ties and top-down structures.

Thus the paper investigates how websites that are affiliated with bounded communities encounter tensions created by the open social affordances of the internet. We use the concept of domestication to study how Orthodox Israeli websites seek to culture, legitimate and frame their internet usage in order to adapt to the constraints of the offline communities with which they seek to affiliate, who view the internet as inherently problematic.

Via in-depth interviews, we uncover that technological choices made by website operators illustrate three unique domestication strategies: controlled, layered and guided. Thus domestication helps explain how members of bounded communities maintain ideological and physical separation with modernity in the ways they engage the internet to successfully navigate issues of community authority and boundary maintenance.

Campbell, H. & Golan, O. (2011). Creating digital enclaves: Negotiation of the internet amongst bounded religious communities. Media, Culture & Society. 33(5), 709-724.

Professor Heidi Campbell