To the people who have educated me and supported me along the way: Thanks.
One other note: I have a lot of social data on this subject. I did a whole 10 page research paper on a related parts of this Judaism, Culture Jamming, and how it affected funding decisions, with footnotes, in 2007. Apparently if I thought about it too much, I probably have expertise in the field (which I why I don’t). Why Judaism? I’m very Jewish, it’s a small population which tends to track itself, and it tends to have a lucky streak of having a mixture of behavioral adoptions for religious-cultural reasons, plus technological reasons. With the size, you can really see a trend happening in front of your eyes, as well as live it. It’s extremely cool. In a way that is hard to describe. Very Niche community to study. Get a niche community and study it, find out why they do the things they do. Always interesting…
Judaism on the Internet is interesting. Judaism has a cultural heritage that already seems to start out based in text. It was also a society already in massive shift due to the 1960s, the Holocaust, the Haskalah and it’s fundamentalist opposition replanted and unsure of itself on New Soil, the sudden drop of anti-semitism in American Life, etc, (not the point of this essay, go read that somewhere else). What happens when this society, this religious life, this ethnic life, encounters media? Especially New Media- as in our Internet Age?
You get people like me. And some other interesting results.
Some important notes: The majority of this post is both relational (as in this is stuff that seems to always be happening to me, since I live on the Internet), based on Chapter 6 of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and data driven (If you want, I can go and look up again things like the Pew-HERI data about religion on the Quads, the National Jewish Population Survey, various Surveys about Jewish college kids, and the Independent Minyan Survey: But you might be really bored by the end, and by bored, I mean really bored, because the amount of data is huge…)
As far as I can tell, online Jewish behavior seems to have developed with email discussion lists about all things Jewish, though primarily in subsets of Jewish Law, both coming out of the more “liberal” movements, and the “Orthodox“movement. There also seems to be some mailing lists archived out there about other earlier independent Jewish issues, such as music, or small prayer groups. But there was a feeling for mass movement to discuss ‘What is Judaism” on the web, as early as possible.
These people were not “natives” per say. They were mostly just interested people. These list still exist (and are very useful). It seems that they became, along with the rise of general blogging, the rise of Jewish blogging as an independent movement to relay information. What was interesting about this where that people felt no fear to talk about issues that they would not talk otherwise about in public, from sex, to intermarriage, to feminism, because they could. More interestingly, the majority of these people were not experts: Some were Rabbis (Hi Josh!), but the vast majority were not.
One of the earliest oddities about this relay were that they were mostly students, primarily university students, doing this for fun. (including Graduate students). Even more interestingly, they were using these technologies in the way most students do: To be subversive and to explore identity. Even though the original founders of a lot of these blogs have moved on, to this day, the core group of readers and writers (since they have changed) for the largest and most well read Jewish blogs, outside of Orthodoxy, seem to be 20 somethings, or inspired by the ones the 20 somethings make.
The first Orthodox ones were also run by young people, and still are. Even more interestingly, for the most part, they were willing to culture Jam on the internet with other denominations and non-affiliated Jewish people who they would not be close to outside of a few friends from college (if they went to a secular college) and if they had family. They massively built structures to talk about the real elements of Orthodox Life. They also managed to get older, more media savvy members involved for serious issues. They shone light on authority structures that were not there before, because they were willing to both talk about their lifestyle, the texts they use, and their happiness (or unhappiness sometimes).
The first time this had a real effect in normative Mainstream Media is when the story of Yehuda Kolko broke to New York Magazine. A rapist of boys, he was chased down by an anonymous blogger out to get him. He found members willing to stand up to the status quo.
While aspects of this were already happening with younger people across denominational lines, through separating off and forming non-affiliated active Jewish groups across the country whose only real physical presence on a day to day basis was the Internet, this was the first time and Internet action affected the wider social structure without the split. These two effects, since I have started reading and being on the Internet, has sped up. There are now more people acting independently to expose and be free on the Internet, when the need arises, both by splitting from the top down communities afforded to them, and by working from the bottom up as insiders to affect change.
The speed of this change is frightening. The Ultra-Orthodox community voted against the official candidate put out by their Yeshiva In Lakewood NJ for the first time, due to media access. The majority of the community made their own choice by themselves, rather than voting en bloc, as usual. Meanwhile, I’m getting links about how intermarriage actually works in practice, when it comes young Jewish people outside the community who are active, by the numbers.
Today was the kicker though: It’s true that I am unhappy with my place as person in parts of the Jewish community. For some reason, having nothing to do with me, Detail Magazine (yes the men’s magazine) decides to publish this.
Apparently I’m sexy because I’m very Jewish. Beyond that joke, the article is interesting because it is a public magazine, publishing on the web, that mentions intimate details of Orthodox Jewish sex life (huh?)?
As McLuhan would say “Electric Speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the non-literate with the semi-literate and the post-literate.”
Religion, or at least Judaism, is coming to that, if its secrets are being openly discussed by a men’s magazine as a feature.
Welcome to the state of media, we find out more and more, because we reveal more and more, and we get more tightly linked socially. Our society changes: Who we are changes. Orthodox people next to porn stars, from the original jams of their unaffiliated student brethren. (or less affiliated, college students after all, hard to describe)
I guess to react, eventually, is normal for everyone and anyone in this state: Tradition is falling apart, and its tough to see it do so in front of your very eyes, and not know what to do. So you try to save it, through the media itself, and that jams it some more. And now, who knows, it will be a blended thing. A flexible thing? I’m not sure. It’s the homogenization of culture, and it is a frightening beast.
This is where the culture jamming comes to play. It is the reuse of the same media to inverse a message. Or to recreate a similar message. Even though Judaism, inherently, is much more diffuse and less structured than say the Catholic Church, the speed of information passage is causing automatic culture Jams. Whereas in previous generations it was much clearer to be a defined sort of Jewish, now it isn’t. As a result, the largest growing group in Judaism is nothing. Nothing. Who knows?
And we leave, we go. You lose it, you lose that glue of traditional culture.. And the internet replaces it. Sort of. It redefines it, because it forces a good look at what the glue was to begin with. So when people push that there is a right way to do something in a tradional place, a tradional culture: Once it experiences media, once the people who live in it experience media, they exit, en mass, to something different, to redefinition.
Which is why to really stop the outflow: Bans. Even then, it is a stopgap. Human curioisty is stronger.
We shall see what the future holds when you culture jam tradition: In no way will it look like today though.
- The Jewish Press Interviews Rabbi Gil Student (lukeford.net) (this article testifies to some of the historical notes that I bring about)
- Clay Shirky on The Social Media Revolution (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
- Face to faith (guardian.co.uk) (that I find this on the web should bother you, and that it is
Mediation on Religion: Or How to Culture Jam Judaism on the Internet
To the people who have educated me and supported me along the way: Thanks.
One other note: I have a lot of social data on this subject. I did a whole 10 page research paper on a related parts of this Judaism, Culture Jamming, and how it affected funding decisions, with footnotes, in 2007. Apparently if I thought about it too much, I probably have expertise in the field (which I why I don’t). Why Judaism? I’m very Jewish, it’s a small population which tends to track itself, and it tends to have a lucky streak of having a mixture of behavioral adoptions for religious-cultural reasons, plus technological reasons. With the size, you can really see a trend happening in front of your eyes, as well as live it. It’s extremely cool. In a way that is hard to describe. Very Niche community to study. Get a niche community and study it, find out why they do the things they do. Always interesting…
Judaism on the Internet is interesting. Judaism has a cultural heritage that already seems to start out based in text. It was also a society already in massive shift due to the 1960s, the Holocaust, the Haskalah and it’s fundamentalist opposition replanted and unsure of itself on New Soil, the sudden drop of anti-semitism in American Life, etc, (not the point of this essay, go read that somewhere else). What happens when this society, this religious life, this ethnic life, encounters media? Especially New Media- as in our Internet Age?
You get people like me. And some other interesting results.
Some important notes: The majority of this post is both relational (as in this is stuff that seems to always be happening to me, since I live on the Internet), based on Chapter 6 of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and data driven (If you want, I can go and look up again things like the Pew-HERI data about religion on the Quads, the National Jewish Population Survey, various Surveys about Jewish college kids, and the Independent Minyan Survey: But you might be really bored by the end, and by bored, I mean really bored, because the amount of data is huge…)
As far as I can tell, online Jewish behavior seems to have developed with email discussion lists about all things Jewish, though primarily in subsets of Jewish Law, both coming out of the more “liberal” movements, and the “Orthodox“movement. There also seems to be some mailing lists archived out there about other earlier independent Jewish issues, such as music, or small prayer groups. But there was a feeling for mass movement to discuss ‘What is Judaism” on the web, as early as possible.
These people were not “natives” per say. They were mostly just interested people. These list still exist (and are very useful). It seems that they became, along with the rise of general blogging, the rise of Jewish blogging as an independent movement to relay information. What was interesting about this where that people felt no fear to talk about issues that they would not talk otherwise about in public, from sex, to intermarriage, to feminism, because they could. More interestingly, the majority of these people were not experts: Some were Rabbis (Hi Josh!), but the vast majority were not.
One of the earliest oddities about this relay were that they were mostly students, primarily university students, doing this for fun. (including Graduate students). Even more interestingly, they were using these technologies in the way most students do: To be subversive and to explore identity. Even though the original founders of a lot of these blogs have moved on, to this day, the core group of readers and writers (since they have changed) for the largest and most well read Jewish blogs, outside of Orthodoxy, seem to be 20 somethings, or inspired by the ones the 20 somethings make.
The first Orthodox ones were also run by young people, and still are. Even more interestingly, for the most part, they were willing to culture Jam on the internet with other denominations and non-affiliated Jewish people who they would not be close to outside of a few friends from college (if they went to a secular college) and if they had family. They massively built structures to talk about the real elements of Orthodox Life. They also managed to get older, more media savvy members involved for serious issues. They shone light on authority structures that were not there before, because they were willing to both talk about their lifestyle, the texts they use, and their happiness (or unhappiness sometimes).
The first time this had a real effect in normative Mainstream Media is when the story of Yehuda Kolko broke to New York Magazine. A rapist of boys, he was chased down by an anonymous blogger out to get him. He found members willing to stand up to the status quo.
While aspects of this were already happening with younger people across denominational lines, through separating off and forming non-affiliated active Jewish groups across the country whose only real physical presence on a day to day basis was the Internet, this was the first time and Internet action affected the wider social structure without the split. These two effects, since I have started reading and being on the Internet, has sped up. There are now more people acting independently to expose and be free on the Internet, when the need arises, both by splitting from the top down communities afforded to them, and by working from the bottom up as insiders to affect change.
The speed of this change is frightening. The Ultra-Orthodox community voted against the official candidate put out by their Yeshiva In Lakewood NJ for the first time, due to media access. The majority of the community made their own choice by themselves, rather than voting en bloc, as usual. Meanwhile, I’m getting links about how intermarriage actually works in practice, when it comes young Jewish people outside the community who are active, by the numbers.
Today was the kicker though: It’s true that I am unhappy with my place as person in parts of the Jewish community. For some reason, having nothing to do with me, Detail Magazine (yes the men’s magazine) decides to publish this.
Apparently I’m sexy because I’m very Jewish. Beyond that joke, the article is interesting because it is a public magazine, publishing on the web, that mentions intimate details of Orthodox Jewish sex life (huh?)?
As McLuhan would say “Electric Speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the non-literate with the semi-literate and the post-literate.”
Religion, or at least Judaism, is coming to that, if its secrets are being openly discussed by a men’s magazine as a feature.
Welcome to the state of media, we find out more and more, because we reveal more and more, and we get more tightly linked socially. Our society changes: Who we are changes. Orthodox people next to porn stars, from the original jams of their unaffiliated student brethren. (or less affiliated, college students after all, hard to describe)
I guess to react, eventually, is normal for everyone and anyone in this state: Tradition is falling apart, and its tough to see it do so in front of your very eyes, and not know what to do. So you try to save it, through the media itself, and that jams it some more. And now, who knows, it will be a blended thing. A flexible thing? I’m not sure. It’s the homogenization of culture, and it is a frightening beast.
This is where the culture jamming comes to play. It is the reuse of the same media to inverse a message. Or to recreate a similar message. Even though Judaism, inherently, is much more diffuse and less structured than say the Catholic Church, the speed of information passage is causing automatic culture Jams. Whereas in previous generations it was much clearer to be a defined sort of Jewish, now it isn’t. As a result, the largest growing group in Judaism is nothing. Nothing. Who knows?
And we leave, we go. You lose it, you lose that glue of traditional culture.. And the internet replaces it. Sort of. It redefines it, because it forces a good look at what the glue was to begin with. So when people push that there is a right way to do something in a tradional place, a tradional culture: Once it experiences media, once the people who live in it experience media, they exit, en mass, to something different, to redefinition.
Which is why to really stop the outflow: Bans. Even then, it is a stopgap. Human curioisty is stronger.
We shall see what the future holds when you culture jam tradition: In no way will it look like today though.
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