Occupying Facebook
In “Occupy Online: Facebook and the Spread of Occupy Wall Street,” Caren & Gaby (2011) propose that “Facebook is potentially less relevant to the Occupy movement than to other movements, and is likely to become less relevant as the movement develops.” Although Caren & Gaby call members of Facebook groups online “occupiers” and refer to [...]
Indonesian Cyberactivists and #OccupyWallStreet
On October 17th, 2011 Anita Rachman of the Jakarta Globe published an article with the headline “Occupy Jakarta? We Might if We Knew We Were Being Invited.” In the article, Rachman suggests that the lack of events organized by a Facebook group called “Occupy Jakarta” demonstrates there is no “real” Occupy movement in Jakarta. Writing [...]
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Religion at Bantar Gebang
2,000 families are estimated to live at Bantar Gebang, Indonesia’s largest trash dump. In this photo, women who live in this community are praying at the end of Ramadan. Photograph: Javaz Tizmaghz, the Guardian
Rawagede massacre compensation case
In an interesting example of a court ruling against the statute of limitations argument for a colonial era compensation case, The Hague civil court has ruled that the Dutch government should compensate the widows of villagers who were killed in the 1947 Rawagede massacre. via the Guardian
Irish Travellers at Dale Farm: Activism, Race, Ethnicity and Cultural Identity
As the attempted eviction of Travellers from Dale Farm seemed more likely, claims surfaced in the media that the Travellers themselves had left and that only “activists” were remaining at Dale Farm. Reporting for the Guardian from inside Dale Farm, John Bingham wrote “The girls are angered at suggestions in the media that there are [...]
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Irish Travellers at Dale Farm: Land, Housing & Eviction
This post represents the beginning of some research I’m doing on the Irish Traveller community at Dale Farm. The working title is “When Nomads Fight To Stay: Land Zoning, Globalized Activism and Forceable Eviction at Dale Farm” On July 4th, 2011, decades of legal battles came to a head with an eviction order for around [...]
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Family Radio Rapture Counter Hits Zero
This is a screen shot taken of the Familyradio.com web site today. Harold Camping, a preacher and radio broadcaster in Oakland, California had predicted that 6pm local time today, May 21, 2011, the Rapture would begin across the world. This idea of a “rapture” or a “rising” comes from a passage in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 [...]
Hams
My reaction to finding this article, in which neighbors complain about an Amateur radio operators antenna, was to remember how important Amateur Radio is. Amateur Radio operators (known to one another as Hams) continue to provide the only long distance rapid communication in and out of regions on public, open airwaves during revolutions, disasters, military crack-downs, etc. when [...]
Imprimatur for iOS App
Catholic News Service reports on the release of “Confession,” an iOS app that walks users through confession. And once they’ve confessed, the sins are “erased”: “Once you go to confession, all that information is wiped out,” said Kreager. “All it’s going to remember is personal data like your name, age and date of last confession.”
Religion, Technology: In Print: 1880-2000
It would appear that 1980 was the year… Run your own Books Ngram here.
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“The loneliness of the long-distance exoplanetary anthropologist…”
There are two kinds of offworld anthropology: Near Distance and Long Distance. With typical Earth-centrism, the “distance” is measured in light years from the Blue Marble. Try explaining to a Gorgolian that he’s “Long Distance” when you’re on his doorstep. At least Gorgolians won’t spit in your face when you try to interview them about [...]
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In Search of a Free System: WikiLeaks & Tron
In The Hacker Ethic, Pekka Himanen argues that the hacker community’s values are a “general social challenge” which include “the goal of getting everybody to participate in the network and to benefit from it, to feel responsible for longer term consequences of the network society, and to directly help those who have been left on [...]
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LDS “Handbook 2″ online
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has put volume 2 of their “Handbook” on the web. This has already produced some interesting media content. For example, the Huffington Post reports “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints takes no stand on drinking Coca-Cola.” This suggests one of the immediate effects of [...]
What are “Indigenous Religions”?
As I browse publisher’s web sites for forthcoming volumes on religion, anthropology, sociology and other topics relevant to my research, I’m struck by one of the categories frequently used: Indigenous Religions. Listed with categories for books on Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Comparative Religions, etc. this Indigenous genre stands out. The other genres are, for the most part, [...]
Aqua Buddha
Rand Paul, Libertarian candidate for Kentucky’s seat in the US Senate and son of former presidential candidate Ron Paul, is set to take office January 2011 to replace Jim Bunning. During the election campaign, an article in GQ magazine “revealed” that while an undergraduate at Baylor (the world’s largest Baptist university) he was a member of a [...]
Bibliography: Religion in Cyberspace
In the New Religious Movements email list (NRM_Scholars), a request for sources on “Religion and the Internet” brought some interesting responses. I’ve collected the references offered by the wise community of researchers on that list, added my own and aggregated some from other lists to start a new bibliography on Religion, the Internet and Cyberspace. [...]
iPhone 4cf: Conflict Free iPhone
In what I have reason to believe is a new campaign from the Yes Men, a web site has launched announcing a free trade-in program for the iPhone 4cf, a new “conflict free iPhone.”
Ethnometaphysics
Oversoul, Alex Gray, 1997 In the Fall 2010 issue of Anthropology of Consciousness, Marc Blainey looks at the “discord in the West between viewing psychoactive substances as either ‘hallucinogens’ or ‘entheogens’,” and makes the case for renewed interest in ethnometaphysics. His article has me thinking more about anthropologists produced by a (mostly) entheophobic culture looking [...]
Life Creates the Universe
“Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe,” by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman, argues for a theory of everything built on biology, not physics. Lanza writes “according to biocentrism, it’s us, the observer, who create space and time.” On the surface, Lanza appears to be applying [...]
Statistics
Some data to share from the site statistics over the last month. Usually, an English language website will have the US, UK and Canada as the top three countries of origin for visits. For some reason, Kenya is currently number two for this site between the US and UK. The visitors are mostly from Nairobi [...]
