stand. Likewise, of course, the lines of longitude and latitude found on some maps don’t exist in any physical form. They merely mark a system of vertical and horizontal coordinates used to identify the precise location of any area on the earth for the purposes of navigation and geographical identification.
Though it may be the case that it is far easier to navigate across the globe with a modern, geopolitical map, it is no less the case that such maps also chart a modern worldview, which assumes the idea of separate nation-states and global navigation along gridlines that make the globe into manageable quadrants. Indeed, most modern maps make the assumption that few of us will travel by foot or otherwise on the ground, generally eliminating the challenges of mountains, lakes, and rivers as other than properties of this nation or that state.
This is no less true in maps of the evolving digital world, where social networking sites have allowed people to cross all sorts of boundaries, setting aside traditional and/or political notions of nation, ethnicity, class, ideology, and so on—including religion. Hence China’s tight control of social networking participation that could—would likely, if we read the 2011 revolution in Egypt through this lens—introduce ideas into the culture that might challenge or override the official narrative. While China holds a remarkable advantage in terms of global capital and geographically located population, a new mapping of the world that highlights the population of just the Facebook social networking community tells a very different story.
The dark areas on the map below are where Facebook is the dominant digital social network. Outside of Brazil, where Google’s Orkut social network dominates, the areas not covered by Facebook are often the territories of more repressive regimes in which the networked, relational, sharing and co-creating of new knowledge is seen by government leaders as a threat.The remarkable fact is that if the population of people who participate on Facebook across the globe were a nation, that country would be the third most populous—just behind China and India, and having more than twice the population of the United States. What’s more, if territory where Facebook dominates were ceded to this new digital nation, it would have as much land mass as North and South America combined, with Africa thrown in for good measure, making it the largest continental territory in the world.2
Of course, Facebook doesn’t exist geopolitically (yet), but a map of the world drawn on the basis of social media participation surely opens a whole new worldview—one in which modern constructions of national identity that are often tied to religious identity are thrown into flux. This blurring of boundaries that for generations we believed were fixed spills out of the online world into physical reality, were people increasingly question cultural constructions of things like gender, race, sexual identity, class, social status, and vocation. We live in a world that is now characterized by the confluence of ideas, collaboration among those separated by time and distance, and the convergence of written, visual, and auditory media across a less and less ideo logically and geopolitically partitioned global landscape.
What this means at a minimum is that, despite our local, sometimes parochial, orientations, we always conduct our ministries in a global context that extends far beyond the expanse of the Christian colonializing impulse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—certainly well beyond the doors of our increasingly empty churches. What’s more, the political and economic power that funded Christian colonialism has shifted in the new digital world order, giving everyone with access to a computer, a laptop, or a lowly smartphone the opportunity to enter, reshape, and even dominate conversations about faith in everyday life. Thus, whether or not we choose to bring our ministries actively into the world reshaped by social media, citizens of that world always have the opportunity to draw us into it by sharing commentary, images, and other content about us and our churches or organizations.
CROWDSOURCING CHRISTIANITY
Now, this could mean that we engage social media defensively—finding ways to ferret out negative perceptions of our leaders, denominations, churches, and other organizations. Indeed, a cottage industry of sorts has grown up around this kind of “reputation management,” serving mainly corporations, politicians, and celebrities by searching for and attempting to erase negative comments, reviews, images, and the like. But this isn’t the only way, nor, we would argue, the best way, to engage the new, digitally widened world. We see digitally connected global networks as profound opportunities to reverse Christian parochialism and colonialism by enabling us to more fully enter into conversation, relationship, and common action that doesn’t override the gifts of one culture with those of another, but which gathers the best of all of us into the Christian project of kingdom-making.
CROWDSOURCING
Crowdsourcing, the idea of outsourcing to an unknown group of responders, is the practice of using social networking to draw upon the expertise and/or resources of people distributed across the globe to solve a problem or address an issue.
JAMES ROLLINS Director of Marketing and Communications, United Methodist Committee on Relief
The challenge of sharing information on the United Methodist Committee on Relief’s and Methodist Global Ministry’s efforts on behalf of the church is not a small one. Neither is encouraging people to support projects that address the spread of malaria in Africa, the creation of community health programs in the Philippines, or the engagement of youth and young adults in service projects in their communities and across the globe.
Rising to such challenges is all in a day’s work for James Rollins, who sees social media not merely as a faster, less expensive conduit for messages to the faithful. He sees social networks like Facebook, which serves as a hub for a variety of online UMCOR ministries, as centers of engagement and participation within and across communities.
The UMCOR “10-Fold” project, for instance, is an online event that begins on October 10 each year (10–10). For ten days, ten projects around the world are highlighted through webcasts, streaming video, and online chats that put people in local church communities in conversation with people in communities where Global Ministries and UMCOR projects are unfolding.
“This is way more than a fund-raising or even an awareness-raising effort,” explains Rollins. “The 10-Fold project is an experience. It allows everyone in the church to have the actual experience of seeing and listening to the people we serve. It absolutely creates a global community for the ministries we do.”
Though 10-Fold has a separate website (10-fold.org), Rollins stresses that the success of the 10-Fold project, which was recognized by the Religion Communicators Council as “Best of Class” in 2010, is very much dependent on a robust Facebook network. “Facebook is the starting point for much of our communication,” says Rollins, “because that’s where people already are. It amplifies and, in a way maybe, bypasses traditional church communications. We are able to be in touch with people whether or not they happened to be in church on Sunday. And, it also starts a conversation that people will take into our churches on Sunday.”
Rollins notes that the remarkably interactive 40,000 members of the UMCOR Facebook page are not just gathering information on and discussing UMCOR-sponsored projects. They’re also sharing their own service. So, for example, you’ll see a request for a local campaign to educate people on human trafficking on All Saints Day to be extended across the wider Methodist Church community. You’ll find discussions of what sorts of snacks to put in backpacks for low-income kids who might not have enough food over the weekend. Folks share photos of bags for relief supplies
