Is Social Media the Opiate of the Masses?
My friend @DanieleRossi interviewed me last week for his podcast "Stuttering is Cool" . In a short followup conversation we had yesterday, he asked me the relevance of my MA in History of Religions and what it has anything to do with social media and social networking.
The answer is: everything.
Indeed, the more that social media advances, I would say that it comes closer and closer to being a bona fide religion. And, no, I am not saying this tongue in cheek or sarcastically.
Religion is social at its foundation. The rules and laws that are part of mostly every religion are created to strengthen the ties between the adherents, and to keep them apart from the others. Through religious discourse, practices and sources, a language emerges that is unique to the members of the fold. Religion requires people to interact with others, whether by communal meals, public prayers with a quorum, exhortations of how to treat the neighbor. Food plays an central role in religion, as well. Through restricting food, religion causes people to shop and eat food with other members of their group, but forbids them from eating with outsiders.
For instance, whereas alcohol is haram (forbidden) at all times in Islam, both the Jews and the Christians came out with laws forbidding drinking wine with the other at different points in history. But both the Jews and Christians use wine in their own ceremonies. If we cannot eat or drink together, we cannot be friends. If we do eat and drink together, we will become friends. If you are in a religion, especially in the modern world, you can always find a sympathetic soul in any place in the world. It gives you a natural commonality. Religions would always have their adherents dress specially, for a double edged reason: on one side they will feel most comfortable with co-religionists, and on the other side they will not be able to assimilate simply into any other culture.
In certain eastern religions, tea has a special place and job, instead of wine.
There are real benefits for the social cohesion caused by religion. Durkheim, for one, notes that the more cohesive religions are, the more that your religion causes you to interact with your neighbor, the lower probability you have to commit suicide.
Anthropologically speaking, religion finds importance in both the details and the large events. They need both. The details keep people involved between the events. There are everything from rites of the various life-cycle events to the minutiae of the daily grind, and everything in between.
In order to bring people together, religions create special songs or hymns that everyone knows and further them brings them together.
Again, commonalities for the sake of community, which means that an adherent has many commonalities with members of his/her religion, and not much with people of other religions.
Knowledge is something aspired to in most modern religions, but was always revered. Much ink has been spilled on the internal corpus of each religion, each with its own laws, norms and practices. The internal writing and responsum connect the literati of the faith.
Religions are structured as such that there is an inherent hierarchy in job, in importance, and in power. Individuals, both clergy and lay, receive this power because of a combination of their knowledge, their devotion (as measured in time), and in many cases, their charisma and/or wealth. Some other religions also include concepts such as heredity and bloodlines. Its difficult but not impossible to rise in the ranks. It does have a lot to do with the aforementioned traits.
The first critique that I hear from people who do not Twitter is: why should anyone care what you ate for lunch? Food brings people together. After Alltop came out with bacon.alltop.com, I started seeing how many people loved it, and starting chatting about it, exchanging recipes and whatnot. Every Friday as many people prepare their Friday night dinners, I see people salivating over other people's menus, even if they are thousands of miles apart. Gary Vaynerchuk's WineLibraryTV creates a community of people who are all drinking the same wines, or at least assisting other people in choosing wines. Those people then go out, and meet new people who enjoy wines together. I am a celiac, and I can personally attest how often that comes up in online conversations. It has brought me closer together with people. Social Networks have been spawned because of epicureans, cooking shows like Eric Ripert's Get Toasted Avec Eric on Blip.tv, and even @RadZack 's Bottles Blends and Brews on Revision3. People have meetup.com's, tweetups, and Third Thirsty Thursday Tasting Groups . Tea has also acquired a healthy following of aficionados on different sites.
In many cases you are able to easily spot an adherent Social Media. They may be wearing a tshirt from a startup, a wristband from @garyvee , or many other things. Some dress like their avatars so they can alway be recognized, no matter the situation.
Viral memes, songs and videos are common currency that members of social media can talk about, and knowledge of them is critical to being part of the group. In the same vein, there are many articles and bloggeries which are considered vital for any member of social media to know about. Common starting knowledge is key for conversation, as is common frameworks in which they operate.
There is a veritable lexicon of phrases, words, and variant meanings that exist in many different social networks on the interwebs, that people then include in their own correspondence with others. They create content in a similar way, because it becomes an accepted style for their social group (or because they wish to mimic).
Using various forms of social media, the mundane details of life attain more meaning. My friend @EstherK has even described tweets as "modern day Brachot (blessings)". I know the daily rituals of my twitter friends. There is beauty in the details, which like in a religious life, is seen on a larger backdrop. That ritual may be running to get the bus in Chicago, or getting a cup of Coffee in Tel Aviv. They do them every day religiously, and tell the world that they are doing that.
There are large events, networking, conventions, conferences, dinners, and anything else that you can think of. These holidays (in the British sense) exist and give the sense of belonging and create the memories that carry relationships through the rest of the year.
A member of Social Media will combine the details and the pictures from the major events together.
I am not only writing about the Twitterati or the power-users, the movers and shakers behind the Silicon Valley, Alley and Wadi. The regular rank and file users of all forms of social media, while not wielding the same power can be likened to regular people who belong to religions. They may not be extremely religious, but there are certain things that they do. The bloggers, podcasters and broadcasters receive power because enough of the regular people follow them, religiously.
Social media makes people feel that they are not alone and that they belong. They are not weird, because there are many other people just like them, with the same arcane, unhealthy obsession with Gossip Girl or arachnoids. People create their own daily rituals surrounded by it. It gives their life renewed meaning.
These groups are engineered to bring people together. The entry is usually very simple, but not always. There are social networks that are extremely difficult to infiltrate, or to receive an invitation to. To become a true member of any network, one cannot just join, but they also have to participate.
The cream rises to to the top in Social Media as well. But anyone can become someone. They just have to have the right gifts or determination to succeed.
I am talking about the macro right now, but the micro rings true as well. Communities, both religious and SocMed, can be large or small and share the same attributes. Change happens when the adherents do not like the status quo, and they revolt and start something new.
Oh, and we cannot forget the heretics. They are needed as well. Thank you @1938Media .
In the end of the day, they both bring people together. They both can be quite elitist, but allow for lower level people to rise.
But social media does something slightly different than religion, which scares me. Religion sets up walls for you, so you cannot interact with others. In social media, the user decides who he/she will interact with, and cut off someone who does not share a commonality without a word.
We socially set up walls for ourselves.
We socially set up walls for ourselves.
Who needs religion anymore?
