by Stephen Pihlaja

If you’ve ever read comments that viewers post on YouTube videos, you know that the Internet can be a rough place for dialogue. Although online interaction between users of different backgrounds presents a unique opportunity for developing mutual understanding and empathy, it is unfortunately often marked by offence and misunderstanding. YouTube videos and comments in particular have a bad reputation for being incendiary and ugly, with users frequently forgetting that there is a face on the other side of the screen. Slurs and insults quickly consume the opportunity for dialogue, with little chance for mutual understanding.

To take an especially challenging example, in 2010, violent responses to and censorship of images of the prophet Muhammad in television and political cartoons spurred an online movement on Facebook and YouTube called ‘Everybody Draw Muhammad Day’ wherein users protested censorship of the images. These online protests had a global impact, leading Pakistan and Bangladesh to briefly ban Facebook and sparked important discussions about free speech, respect for other traditions, and religious expression in online environments.

Over the next two years, I hope to carefully investigate the language used in antagonistic interaction on YouTube during Everybody Draw Muhammad Day. I will build on previous research showing that metaphor played an important role in contributing to negative evaluations and offensive interactions between atheist and Christians users on YouTube. By analysing how language is used in videos made for and in response to ‘Everybody Draw Muhammad Day 2010,’ I hope to reveal the nuts and bolts of antagonism embedded in language, showing how language use contributed to perceptions of offence and misunderstanding between users.

I believe strongly that identifying moments of antagonism in language use could serve as an important resource for scholars and religious practitioners, particularly those struggling to resolve conflict around religious expression and free speech. Rather than discuss disagreements between users primarily in terms of large-scale differences in cultural or religious beliefs, I believe that starting from a small-scale perspective and looking closely at actual moments of disagreement and antagonism in interaction helps make abstract disagreements much clearer, and therefore, potentially easier to solve.

Instead of first talking about long histories of offense, I think there is value in focusing on single moments in interaction and identifying clearly in the language where misunderstanding is occurring. Once we can identify these moments where people are clearly misunderstanding one another, I think we can begin to talk about how antagonism can be diffused. Ultimately, we may be able to develop tools for positive, constructive interaction through more effective communication.

In the spirit of meaningful online dialogue, if this research sounds like it might be useful to you in your work or ministry, I would love to hear from you. Send me a message at S.S.Pihlaja@open.ac.uk with the subject line ‘Potential Impact’. Any and all thoughts would be welcome. Let the dialogue begin!

Stephen Pihlaja is a PhD Student a the Open University, UK

Sheik Hamza Yusuf

From The New York Times

A recent spate of arrests of Muslims accused of terrorism in the United States has revealed that many of them were radicalized by militant preaching they found on the Internet.

Now nine influential American Muslim scholars have come together in a YouTube video to repudiate the militants’ message. The nine represent a diversity of theological schools within Islam, and several of them have large followings among American Muslim youths.

The video is one indication that American Muslim leaders are increasingly engaging the war of ideas being waged within Islam.

“We need to shepherd our own flock and to say that, theologically, these things are unacceptable,” said Imam Suhaib Webb, the educational director for the Muslim American Society, a grass-roots group in Santa Clara, Calif., who is among the nine in the video. “The Prophet Muhammad, when on the battlefield, saw that amongst the enemy there were innocent women and children killed, and he was openly angry. He is prohibiting us from killing the innocent. It is very clear.”

Click here to read the entire article.

From The Huffington Post

By Joshua Stanton

While I agree that dialogue is often impeded by different understandings of the same terms or metaphorical representations, it would seem that YouTube itself engenders a unique kind of interaction. It may well be the closest thing to in-person dialogue, as dialogue partners often video their own answers to viewers’ comments or cite other personal or television-based film clips that the website makes available. You can often actually see the person with whom you are in dialogue, hear his or her voice, and gain interpretive nuance from the body language he or she projects.

Given the often personal nature of YouTube, some might argue that it is the worst of all possible scenarios for interchange. People make themselves vulnerable by putting their thoughts online in the most personal of mediums, yet responses are not governed by in-person social norms and decorum, so much as the online social free-for-all.

In some cases, this may indeed be true on YouTube itself, as Pihlaja makes clear through his article. Yet Facebook may again transform these common online practices. Facebook ‘friends’ have a reputation to uphold. They interact with the same people on a regular basis and are thereby held more responsible, both online and in person, for the remarks they make.

While YouTube itself remains a precarious platform for discussion, its use in conjunction with Facebook has expanded the scope of inter-religious dialogue. Dialogue need not be confined solely to the formal meeting room or conference. It can now happen all the time, in a more organic way.

Yet within this web of potential, there remains a dearth of carefully honed videos with which to engage people in online dialogues that do not hinge upon the news and the prisms through which it is refracted. A handful of organizations, including the Interfaith Youth Core, Parliament of the World’s Religions, Intersections International, and Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, have sought to fill it in part. But such efforts must be expanded.

Click here to read the full article.

Bridging Babel: New Social Media and Interreligious Dialogue and Intercultural Understanding explores how social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube connect users with a culturally diverse audience, allowing for communication at an unprecedented level of speed and accessibility. This report was released by undergraduate fellows at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

The undergraduate fellows conducted 39 in-depth interviews with scholars, religious and interfaith leaders and technology experts. They also conducted a survey at the 2009 World Parliament of Religions in Australia and online through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn social media outlets.

Michael Nelson, visiting professor of Internet studies in Georgetown’s communications, culture and technology program, served as faculty advisor on the project.

“Together we’re exploring a brand new field and creating the best available source of information on how – and how not to –use Web 2.0 tools like Facebook to bridge the barriers between people of different faiths,” Nelson said.

While the interviews showed a diverse range of opinions about how to use social media to foster interreligious dialogue, with some saying that only face-to-face dialogue is useful, the report notes that online interaction is the wave of the future.

“Interfaith understanding is about communication, and communication is increasingly about new social media,” notes center director Thomas Banchoff in the report. “If we want to support dialogue across religious divides on the world’s most pressing policy challenges, we need a better grasp of how technology connects people and mobilizes them for action.”

Click here to read the full article

The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions (CPWR) — the organization that administers our international Parliaments, Pre-Parliament Events, Partner Cities Network and more — has just launched a Facebook Fan Page.  The Page includes an interface with all of our YouTube and Flickr content, an RSS/Blog tab where you can read all of our blogs and Twitter posts, a discussion board, informative “Boxes,” a “Wall” for public bulletins and more.  We are happy to bring all of this information together in one location, and hope it will complement our home page as an introduction to the important interreligious work done at the Parliament.

Come on over, sign in to Facebook and become a fan: here!

The Parliament of Religions is happy to share several videos that we have put together. They each wrestle with questions confronting the world today and try to come to grips with the roles that religion can fill and the opportunities that it presents.

They are:

How Can We Seek Peace While Promoting Justice?

What Does Our Spirituality Teach Us About Poverty?

Can Religious Organisations Promote Social Cohesion?

Who Will Guide Us in Our Care of the Earth?

You can see these videos and more at the Parliament’s YouTube channel here.