Religious views:____Anybody???

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Religion on fb: What are your religious views• The religious views box made its debut in 2006

• Political views follows suit.

• MySpace eg

• Since then, Facebook's beliefs box has generated a staggering number of entries. So exactly how many users put down "beer" as their religion? How many "Catholic"?

• Company spokeswoman Meredith Chin declined to answer such questions, citing user privacy.

• But she gave hints and not surprisingly, the most popular faith professed is "Christian". The category is so dominant that for this list, Facebook's statisticians insisted on combining such other designations as "Protestant," "Catholic" and "Mormon" under the label. As a result, the second most popular entry on the list is "Islam," followed by "Atheist."

• Jedi makes a grand entrance at No.10

Results from a study

• An excerpt from a recent New York Times Magazine article (Jacobs, 2007) simultaneously illustrates the central role that social networking Web sites have come to play in young people’s self-presentation, and the inappropriateness that this age group attaches to

an overly religious self-disclosure. Focusing on peer interactions among college students, the article quotes a Harvard undergraduate who describes, what she portrays to be, a typical peer encounter:

• You might run into someone at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they crazy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains over presenting themselves. It’s like an embodiment of your personality” (p. 48).

• The Barna Group, a Christian ministry research and consulting firm (Kinnaman & Lyons, 2007).

• Given the importance of social networking Web sites to contemporary youth culture, and given the potentially complex relationship between religion’s significance in the lives of young people and the accuracy of their self-disclosures about religion, this study aimed to address the following two research questions:

• 1) How accurately do religious young people express their religious identities in their Facebook profiles? and 2) To what extent does social desirability shape these young people’s religious self-disclosures in these profiles?

• The panel of respondents was assembled using snowball sampling

• drawn from the membership of a campus organization affiliated with a conservative evangelical Christian denomination.

• Sunday services, campus ministry organizations.

• Used fb, once every other week to three to four times per day.

Some responses• I don’t think I liked the choices that were up there, I think they had

just … let’s see … Religious Views … oh, it’s a blank box … ok, I don’t know to be honest … I guess, just ‘cause, like, I don’t consider myself like Baptist or like Church of Christ or Catholic or anything specific, I kind of … I don’t know … like, Christian would be just the basic overall thing … so I don’t know why I haven’t put that on there. I don’t think that I’ve ever really noticed the religious box.

• Jack, the 23-year-old political science major, said, “I wouldn’t deny religion but I’m not the sort of person to wear like a sign … I just don’t feel the need to broadcast that sort of thing … I’m not typically the type of person to be like, ‘Hi I’m Jack, I’m a Christian.

• Crystal said that she did not write anything in this field because she did not want her profile visitors to generate negative impressions of her based on this cue. She said that, for the same reason that she did not overtly identify herself as a Christian, she also changed the Political Views field on her profile from “Conservative” to “Moderate”:

Some observations• The resolve demonstrated by this study’s respondents to self-

disclose in a socially desirable manner reflects Goffman’s (1959) classic observation that the presentation of self is a carefully controlled performance of one’s character before an audience.

• The Internet allows its users to be less accurate in their self-disclosures, and influenced by social desirability to a greater degree, than many other communication venues.

• In one survey, young people said they perceived “a lot” or “some” of born-again Christians to be anti-homosexual (91%), judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), too involved in politics (75%), out of touch with reality (72%), insensitive to others (70%), boring (64%), not accepting of other faiths (64%), and confusing (61%).

Second year Mass Communication

So what does yours say? Are/were you willing

to go public with your religious views?

Game? For spotting….• Not religious: Abisek,agni,prajeeth,

joylsna,agnostic,rhitwick,shino,sharhad,sandesh,vivek.

• Religious:avinii,bala murugan,fiyaz,Jason,juby,monisha,sabith,shafeek,sithara,Vishnu c,

• Neither:ahsan,amuda,ashwathi,boni,deepa,dileep,harsha,reality,john, sunnie,hasan,Naveen,nideesh,priyanka,ramin, sangeeta,mr.haneef,sumanth,teju,thulsi,varisha,Vishnu

• Three characteristics of young people’s religious systems suggest that religion will not figure prominently in their Facebook profiles.

• First, lack of conversations about religion. Smith (2005, p. 124)

• Second, inability to express personal religious beliefs(p. 131).

• And disapproval of excessive religious identification

Religious social networking sites• CHRISTIAN• ChristianNetwork , Hisholyspace.com, Holypal.com, Imagine Yourself,

Mypraize• UltimateTube, Xianz• INTERFAITH• Beliefnet’s Community is the social networking area of the largest interfaith

website.• PeaceNext is the social networking site of the Council for a Parliament of the

World’s Religions.• ISLAMIC• Muslimsocial.com, Muxlim, Naseeb• JEWISH• Shmooze is a general Jewish social networking site with an emphasis on

relationships.• NEO-PAGAN• PaganSpace.net is a social networking site for followers of Earth-based

religions, such as Wicca, Asatru, druidism and goddess-based faiths.

Most Engaging Pages on fb

Name Fans Interactions

1. Jesus Daily 5,034,761 2,127,067

2. The Bible 6,926,620 1,119,413

3. Justin Bieber 26,404,878 1,075,159

4. Lady Gaga 33,214,214 893,979

5. Manchester United 12,868,950 834,305

6. Real Madrid C.F. 12,774,646 822,342

7. Mario Teguh 3,939,097 775,420

8. FC Barcelona 13,912,175 771,775

9. Necip Fazil Kisakurek 920,057 529,674

10. Vin Diesel 22,758,954 464,003

11. The Twilight Saga 20,452,376 442,105

12. Avril Lavigne 18,372,875 422,470

13. We are Khaled Said 1,198,347 419,336

14. Jesus Christ 2,400,855 416,320

15. ILoveAllaah.com 5,432,763 373,575

16. Dios Es Bueno! 3,358,951 360,664

17. Lil Wayne 23,616,701 360,228

18. LA Lakers 7,941,899 333,084

19. NBA 8,435,891 332,770

20. Müzik Keyfi 1,364,733 332,641

Facebook Gets Religion. But You Can't Poke the Pope.

But You Can't Poke the Pope. • A high-speed version of the way religion has moved into each

new medium, from the days of print onwards, and tried to leverage it to drive ethical, social and political agendas.

• "We recognize that a church that does not communicate ceases to be a church.“

• Iran and Indonesian imams

• So has fb gotten religion????

• But today these moves leave room for amusement: The Vatican's Facebook app seems gently kitsch, and Indonesia's suggestion seems naïve.