Tweet f U Heart Jesus: Leadership, Community & Communication in the Age of Obama

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Religious Leadership, Communications, and Community in the Age of Obama

Elizabeth Drescher, PhD Director, Center for Anglican Learning & Leadership

Assistant Professor of Christian Spiritualities Church Divinity School of the Pacific

+Quick Presentation Schematic

Your Questions and Comments

3. How do they work?

b.

What tools are out there?

I.

How has web communication

changed LC&C?

2

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+A Very Brief Historical Overview of Social Media in Christianity

1st Century CE Pauline Proto-Blogging

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+“Abba, give me a tweet…”


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3rd Century CE Desert Ammas and Abbas introduce “friending”

and anticipate “tweeting”

+An Inconvenient Truth…


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4th – 9th Centuries CE Medievals popularize pre-HTML “hypertexting”

+Hurrying through History…

High Middle Ages Reformation

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+The Next Thing We Know…

Are these sites the future for religion in the digital age? Or, is digital religion still in the Middle Ages?

Worse, are we stuck in Modernity?

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+ How Digital Communication has Changed and What We have to Do to Get On Board

1990 “Flash

Mobbing”

1994 Mainstream media end-run

2004 “Worker Bees”

create the buzz, build the hive

(candidate stings himself) 2008

Aggregation yields emergence

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+How the Web Itself Has Changed

Web 1.0 Web 2.0+

Interacting

Educating

Aggregating

Networking

Interrupting

Broadcasting

Targeting

Broadcasting

Mod

el

Relational M

odel

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+Three Keys to the Social Web

1.  “Leaders are Places”

2.  An Emergence is Created by Swarms, not Queens

3.  Only Connect


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+1. Leaders are Places

 “You’re not a leader, you’re a place. You’re like a park or a garden. If it’s comfortable and cool, people are attracted. Deanspace is not about Dean. It’s about us.”

~ Joi Ito, entrepreneur and “emergent democracy” activist, in 2004 on the effectiveness of the Howard Dean internet strategy

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+ Leadership in the Web 2.0+ World The Art of Losing Control

 What Web 2.0+ users do want:   Valuable, meaningful,

authentic content

  Site creator transparency

  Access to “thought leaders”

  Focus on mechanics

  Interactivity

  Creative participation

  Searchability

 What Web 2.0+ users don’t want:   Marketing

  Preaching

  Focus on aesthetics

  Digital catalogue or directory

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+Leadership Develops Collaboratively


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+2. An Emergence Created by Swarms, not Queens

  “In simplest terms, [networks] solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent ‘executive branch.’ … They get their smarts from below. In more technical language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing the behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.”

~ Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2001)


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+3. Only Connect…

 Web 2.0 participation requires multiple entry points that allow interactive engagement and point back to a central web hub

  Facebook

  Twitter

  YouTube

  Flickr

  News and Blog sites

  eCommunities

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+Facebook Groups


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+Facebook Events


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+Twitter


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+YouTube


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+Flicker


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+Blogs and News Sites


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+You Gotta Get Out More Often: Linking and Commenting


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+Expand the News


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+eCommunities


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+It’s All about Conversion


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Building Together

+ A Basic Process Overview for Leading Community on the Social Web

Map Relationships

Explore the World

Recruit and Connect

Join the Conversation Promote

Measure

Improve

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+Resources

  Chris Anderson, The Long Tale: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006)

  Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001)

  Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2001)

  Clay Shirky, The Power of Organizing without Organizations (2008)

  Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982)

  Larry Weber, Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business (2007)


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