Timothy K. Morgan, who has been doing research on the uses of social media to memorialize the dead, asks and answers a provocative question: “Is using Twitter a religious act? I’m convinced it can be.”
Our research on Sandy Hook indicates that following a national tragedy, social media creates new possibilities for religious practice, allowing us to directly access firsthand accounts and to express our faith and solidarity in the face of unimaginable suffering from essentially anywhere on the globe. We found that Twitter provides us a place both to offer condolences and compassion to those who have been directly impacted and to make meaning of such events for ourselves.
For example, in the wake of Sandy Hook, the hashtag #nowords, which began as a social commentary on the ridiculousness of the Internet, took on a more solemn and profound sensibility. Indeed, many of us did not have the words to make any sense of it. ….
When we compared tweets about Newtown, we found that tweets designated as prayer used photos and graphics 50 percent more than general condolences. These included photo memorialization of the victims, photos of prayer vigils and other images filled with religious significance. Twitter and smartphones provided an unanticipated and soul-stirring alternative to conventional words of prayer, inviting us to forgo language altogether and bring the poetry of silence to our contemporary religious practices.”
How do Morgan’s conclusions square with your own experience of using social media during a time of either personal or national crisis?
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Anything can be a religious act (what you honor may vary). Speech, that most marvelous of gifts, can be, by its presence or absence, can be religious.
You just have to be responsible.
Why not? Ms. Glover says in her recent book on social networking, “Virtual relationships are real relationship, but they are different kind of relationships.” It seems to me that if you decide what kind of relationship you want your virtual relationships to be, and keep your tweets consistent with that, you should be okay. Always be appropriate. Mary Morrison
Like anything else, I think “tweeting’ can be a religious act, especially if it is seen as being done in community (the “twitterverse”, as it were). Acknowledging God and others in the context of one’s life can be as profound as hours of prayer with others in a sanctuary or minutes of conversation via the Internet.