Christine Rosen on Thinking Religiously about Facebook

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Facebook is now a central fact of world politics, commerce, and affairs. With more than 2.3 billion users worldwide, it has more users than there are Christians or Muslims, not to mention Jews. Industry analysts project that by 2020 more marketing dollars will be spent on Facebook alone than on the entire TV ad market.

It is, in sum, a global presence that hovers above the world declaring that it desires nothing but to connect us with each other, to convene community. Its understanding of itself, its understanding of us, and its understanding of human nature, therefore, invite serious religious questions: How should a religious person think about Facebook; how can we think about Facebook through a religious lens?

It’s those questions Christine Rosen tackles in this episode of the Tikvah Podcast. The author of a forthcoming book about technology and social media, Christine Rosen joins Tikvah’s Jonathan Silver to help us think about how religious communities relate—and should relate—to one of the most powerful, ubiquitous social realities of our time.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof and "Above the Ocean" by Evan MacDonald.

Transcript

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0:00.0	With more than 2.3 billion users worldwide, there are more Facebook users in this world than Christians.
0:15.2	Industry analysts project that by 2020, more marketing dollars will be spent on Facebook
0:20.0	on this one platform than the
0:21.7	entire TV ad market altogether. Facebook is a central fact of politics and commerce and world
0:27.7	affairs. But how does a religious person think about Facebook? And how can we think about Facebook
0:32.5	through a religious lens? Facebook is this global presence that hovers above the world, declaring that it
0:39.6	desires nothing but to connect us with each other and to convene community. Its understanding of
0:44.5	itself, and whether or not it consciously articulates it, its understanding of us, of human nature.
0:50.1	All invite real theological questions. Welcome to the Tikva podcast.
0:55.7	I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.
0:59.3	This week, I'm joined by Commentary Magazine senior writer Christine Rosen,
1:02.7	the author of a forthcoming book about technology and social media.
1:06.6	Together, we think about how traditional religious communities relate to one of the most powerful, ubiquitous social realities of our time.
1:10.1	If you enjoy this conversation, you can subscribe
1:12.0	to the Tikva podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify, and I hope you leave us a five-star
1:17.2	review to help us grow this community of ideas. I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other
1:22.7	podcast episodes at TikTokFund.org. And of course, if you want to learn more about our work
1:28.7	at Tikva, you can visit our website, tikfafund.org, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
1:33.8	Here now is my conversation with Commentary Magazine senior writer, Christine Rosen.
1:39.6	Christine Rosen, welcome to the Tikva podcast. Thank you. So I want to ask you if Facebook has been good or bad for traditional religious communities in America, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. But before I ask you that, how would you even know? Two very good questions. The question of how we know can't really be answered because we don't have a lot of good research on how people of faith use
2:02.9	social media. There are studies here and there, none of them definitive. But I think we can
2:08.5	extrapolate a little bit from what we have seen people do on Facebook. And my short answer to that
	...

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