Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Цифровизация общества и будущее христианства к вопросу о трансформации ценностно-нормативной системы общества. Материалы VII Между народной научной ко
.pdf
Алекс Хон-Хо. Методологический обзор цифровой теологии и исследование...
may aff ect the concept bible. With the introduction of social media, he
found that although there is no change in the context of the text, there are
many paratextual social media such as blogs, Facebook pages and YouTube
Channel which provide information and programmes based on the bible.
These range from formal interpretation of the bible to pastoral preaching of
biblical texts to therapeutic sharing of biblical verses with images attached
to them. He also found that these paratextual social media have an enormous impact on Christians as far as the number viewed, shared and subscribed are concerned. This surely supports our research on the one hand
and points to a new direction on the other. Social media have grown from
a way to read the bible and to search for information about it to be providers of content themselves. This shows that social media not only aff ect our
habits but they exert infl uence on our understanding of the bible. Also,
with a more virtual church, worship, preaching and other online teaching, our Christian practice is inevitably aff ected. The only questions are:
to what extent, how and in what sense? This paper aims at contributing to
the development of digital theology in ways of investigating to what extent
does the social media using pattern may aff ect Christians’ biblical interpretation.
Big Data, Social Media and Biblical Interpretation
The reason for hypothesising that there is a relationship between social
media and biblical interpretation in the era of Big Data is because our every action on social matter, whether we notice or not, is stored, analysed
and used. Our actions will be stored and analysed as data in social media
companies like Facebook. These data are very valuable for social media
companies, businesses, and politicians as they reveal accurate and important information about the habits, interests, items of the greatest interest
and objects of love and hate for a huge population. Social media companies
make use of this information to help businesses target the right market.
Politicians can make use of the information concerning people’s hidden
likes and dislikes on certain issues to manipulate public opinions or even
election results [11, p. 3]. The social media platform providers are also motivated to use various strategies to ensure users remain as long as possible on
the platform — so-called engagement — as the longer you stay on their me-
dia, the more information they can get from your actions. Accordingly, this
31
Христианство и глобальные сети
research paper asks the following question: Will this cycle of information
collection, analysis and fi ltering aff ect Christians’ biblical interpretations?
Will it polarise Christians’ views on some controversial biblical verses?
Big Data information mining
One of the most revolutionary breakthroughs in association with Big
Data is that it is possible to generate large amounts of information about a
person or a large group of people from data that was previously considered
useless. Some of these vast amounts of information generated by Big Data
are highly accurate. For example, Google Flu Trends, employing Big Data
since 2004, have provided very accurate forecasts of infl uenza numbers
[2, p. 782]. How are such accurate predictions possible? This comes from
a combination of diff erent improvements in technology making the data
mining process available to companies. First and foremost, among these is
surely the signifi cant decrease in the cost of storing large amounts of data.
The cost of storing data has decreased by 30% to 40% each year over the
past few years, facilitating the high volume, velocity and variety of data to
be stored [2, p. 474]. This is signifi cant because the more data that can be
collected and analysed, the more accurate the predictions can be made.
The reduction in the cost of storing data subsequently has created the basic
environment for the era of Big Data. As a result, more and broader varieties
of data can be stored for analysis.
The second technology improvement is Big Data analytics. New technologies such as the NOSQL database, Hadoop and MapReduce have
emerged to help analyse the huge amounts of data [10, p. 4]. It is not only
the huge amounts of data that have generated the paradigm shift that we
have described but also the broadness of the data that can be collected and
analysed. However, much of the collected data, such as our private messages, photos and reactions on social media, are still controversial from the
perspective of ethics, even as they have been analysed by numerous electronic platforms for generating commercially valuable data. The outcome is
explosive and can bring a new paradigm in commercial activities as well as
our daily lives. The McKinsey Global Institute describes Big Data as a new
factor of production, which implies it is as important as other traditional
resources like land and capital [10, p. 4]. The value of Big Data also refl ects
its ground-breaking importance to business. Facebook earned 18 billion
32
Алекс Хон-Хо. Методологический обзор цифровой теологии и исследование...
dollars net income in 2019 while Toyota, the world’s largest motor vehicle
producer, earned 22 billion dollars net income in the same year
1
. How can
a social media platform earn nearly as much as the world’s largest motor
vehicle company? What does Facebook produce? What makes its services
so valuable? It provides a platform for users free of charge but collects their
information and in return provides accurate information for businesses
to use selling their products. This accurate information is highly valuable
and gives a range of actors and enterprises the ability to aff ect our daily
lives by using it to manipulate our motivations and behaviour. The next
section will address how social media, especially Facebook, contribute to
the era of Big Data.
New Sources of Data: Social Media
The rise of social media has contributed signifi cantly to the era of Big
Data, as it provides a new and specifi c source of data. Social media refers to electronic platforms where people connect with their friends and
relatives mainly for social functions. By using social media, people reveal
their preferences, values and priorities, which cannot be found formally or
without a very high cost on other channels. On social media, users usually
type a short message and make short comments or post photos, which,
without the new technology, would be meaningless to anyone other than
the user. With new technology like natural language processing (NLP),
however, all these short texts, social actions or reactions on social media
can be transformed into usable data [3, pp. 63–64]. New technology on
sentiment analysis also helps to detect users’ sentiments from their actions
on social media [3, pp. 72–73]. The blossoming of social media is also the
blossoming of new and huge sources of data for data users. The question
is not only what can become data, but also how will the social media platforms use those data? Due to the limitations of this paper, we will focus on
the world’s largest social media platform, Facebook, as an example. The
reason for choosing Facebook as the example for study is obvious, since
1
‘Toyota Net Income 2006–2019,’ Macrotrends, accessed 26 March, 2020, https://
www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TM/toyota/net-income; ‘Facebook Net Income
2009 to 2019,’ Macrotrends, accessed 26 March, 2020, https://www.macrotrends.net/
stocks/charts/FB/facebook/net-income
33
Христианство и глобальные сети
it is the largest and one of the earliest successful social media platforms.
Facebook is not merely a social medium, as many users may think. It is
the world’s largest social media company with 2.5 billion active users in the
fourth quarter of 2019.
1
Every minute, more than 500,000 comments are
posted, 293,000 statuses updated and 136,000 photos uploaded on Facebook [9, p. 118]. How it conducts business and makes uses of the data it
collects will have a signifi cant impact on its users, therefore establishing its
worth for using as an example in our study.
Facebook is not merely a platform that neutrally allows users to interact with their friends but, similar to other platforms in the era of Big Data,
it stimulates our participation to reveal our preferences, collects all the information that is thereby exposed, analyses it and uses it, not coincidentally, in ways that are profi table to the company and its clients. The focus of
the following section is twofold. The fi rst part will focus on Facebook as a
social media source of information in the era of Big Data. What information is it able to gather? How does it gather information and how does it
use this information? The second part will be a higher-order question that
investigates how Facebook provides information to the platform’s customers. Is it really free and open or does it contain inherent biases?
Not only does Facebook note and record every action we make on the
venue but also entices us to reveal more and stay longer. The reason is that
the more frequently we visit and the longer we stay on Facebook, the more
information will be revealed to the company’s algorithms [11, p. 10]. The
design of Facebook is therefore not neutral but focuses on whatever is likely
to attract your attention and stir you emotions. Facebook’s programmers
are experts in this. The company provides the best platform for people to
update their own status to earn “likes.” Both the status you post and the reaction you post on others’ status become important information for Facebook. This attracts users to post as many stories about their private lives as
possible, since the more personal and current information you provide,
the more likely you are to buy products suggested by social media [4, p. 7].
These items of information can be diffi cult to collect by other means but
is made easy through your status, regardless of the reason you provide it.
For example, every time you post a photo tagging friends, it generates in-
1
‘Number of Monthly Active Facebook Users Worldwide as of 4th quarter
2019,’ Statista, accessed 24 March, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/
number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide
34
Алекс Хон-Хо. Методологический обзор цифровой теологии и исследование...
formation on your favourite places to go, styles of food, and entertainment.
The platform also allows you to react to others’ posts so that they can learn
your preferences through your actions. As explained in the previous section, NLP technology also allows social media providers to read the messages you post on your status. Facebook also cooperates with other online
platforms and companies to allow them to use your Facebook account to
lock in their page. This move allows Facebook access to information about
the products or pages you visit beyond Facebook.
As a company, Facebook not only runs its own venue but also owns
other major means of social media, including WhatsApp, Instagram and
others. All your information on these media will also be collected in your
personalised account on Facebook. Moreover, through the new partnership service provided by Facebook to other companies called Open Graph,
users of Facebook can use their Facebook account to log in to other electronic platforms, such as Spotify. From this kind of partnership and the
use of tracking cookies, a technology for reading personal data concerning
your actions on the Internet, Facebook is able to further extend its information sources by this kind of new technology [11, p. 58].
Without the rise of social media, all this information would probably
not be available for the business world. To encourage you to stay longer
on Facebook, the platform also uses a technology called a ‘fi lter bubble’.
The social media analyist Eli Pariser coined this term to refer to social media or search engines, such as Facebook and Google, respectively. Each
company uses engines that run algorithms to provide users’ information or
posts that you may like the most and reduce those that you may not like or
are not among your preferences according to all the data they have gathered about you. This way of feeding information to users keeps us using the
social media for extended sessions but limits our view and opportunities to
hear voices other than our own [11, p. 9]. Pariser is right in saying that the
personalisation fi lter in social media and search engines is a kind of ‘invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our
desire for things that are familiar...’ [11, p. 15]. Driven by business motives,
Facebook gathers users’ information and feeds them with the posts or views
that are closer to the users’ own view. In this way, Facebook is never a neutral platform but exerts an infl uence over our views and lives from various
perspectives, including the political and religious.
In short, in the era of Big Data, social media, like Facebook, do not act
solely as service providers but as information and context providers and,
35
Христианство и глобальные сети
most importantly, advertisers. Even though these companies promise not
to sell our information directly, they help businesses advertise to the right
customers based on their calculated data. They also maximise the potential
customers’ possible contact time by various strategies, including fi ltering
posts that suit our preferences and posts that attract more reactions, which
are more likely to be those with short messages and relatively extreme views,
because the longer we stay, the more data we will provide to them and the
more room they have to advertise various products to us. How Facebook
collects and uses our data is highly controversial and generates questions
about politics and ethics. However, this paper focuses on how Facebook’s
commercial strategy of data collection and uses may exert an impact on
Christians’ interpretation of the Bible. I do not assume that Facebook or
other external users may intentionally use Facebook to manipulate our understanding of some controversial verses of the Bible, but it is possible. The
survey, based on the commercial strategy of collecting and using data and
the possible eff ect this has on every user, seeks to determine if there is any
impact on Christians’ interpretation of the Bible.
Hypothesis and method of the survey
In order to look deeper into the possible relationship between social
media and biblical interpretation, we conducted a survey in Hong Kong
during October 2019. The hypothesis in this survey is that given the view
and technology of the era of Big Data explained in the above sections, social media are not merely neutral platforms but operators of profi t-making
data management strategies that could aff ect our views, including biblical
interpretation. This survey does not discuss whether one interpretation or
another is right but focuses on fi nding the patterns of Hong Kong Christians
when using social media and the possible relationships with their interpretation of the Bible. Based on 780 collected questionnaires, the following
section will fi rst present the results of the survey and correlations concerning Hong Kong Christians’ social media use patterns, their political views,
political participation patterns and interpretation of political-related biblical verses, mainly using Facebook as the target. After the presentation of
data and correlations, I will provide an analysis based on the characteristics
of Big Data. Finally, I will share the theological and social implications of
the results.
36
Алекс Хон-Хо. Методологический обзор цифровой теологии и исследование...
Although this paper is not exegetical, we take the biblical interpretation framework known as socio-rhetorical interpretation (SRI) as our basic
assumption on the major factors aff ecting Christians’ interpretation of the
Bible. SRI, which emphasises the communicative purpose of a text, suggests that the meaning or understanding of a text contains four essential
layers but without being limited to these four. The four layers include the
inner texture, inter-texture, socio-cultural texture and ideological texture
[1, pp. 20–21]. We have no room to give a full elaboration of SRI but will
briefl y explain what the four textures are and in what way the use of social
media will be relevant in light of SRI. The inner texture refers to all the literary characteristics we can identify by looking into the text itself. It could
be the use of repeated words or groups of words and the use of a special
sentence structure and so on. The inter-texture refers to the use of words,
borrowing or echoing their meaning, which have appeared in other texts.
Socio-cultural texture refers to the social and cultural contexts, which may
aff ect the writers’ and readers’ understanding of the meaning of the text.
Ideological texture refers to the underlying presupposition, bias and values
of writers and readers
1
. We will borrow the framework of these four textures in our analysis. Based on this framework of understanding a text, we
hypothesise that Christians’ interpretation of the Bible may be aff ected by
their use of social media since doing so will aff ect their perception of the
social and culture situation as well as their ideology. Both the intensity of
social media use and the information users receive through social media
will aff ect the socio-cultural texture and ideological texture from the readers’ perspective. The impact of the use of social media will also be positively related to the time spent on social media. Therefore, in the survey,
our concern includes the time spent, types of social media and signifi cant
activities on Facebook, with the aim of determining if there is any correlation between these characteristics and biblical interpretations we can draw
from our data.
The survey, in Chinese, was conducted from 15/10/2019 to 23/10/2019.
Questionnaires in the form of Google Forms were distributed through pastors and church members of diff erent denominations through electronic
media, including email, Facebook posts and WhatsApp. Among the surveyed Christians, 40% are male and 60% are female. The age distribution
1
‘Ideology Textures,’ Dictionary of So cio-rhetorical Terms, accessed 1 April, 2020,
http://www.religion.emory.edu/faculty/robbins/SRI/defns/i_defns.cfm#ideological
37
Христианство и глобальные сети
is also spread quite evenly from 15–24 at 11,4%, 25–34 at 24%, 35–44 at
27%, 45–54 at 23% and 55–64 at 12%. The education level is quite high,
with 50% having a graduate degree and 24% a master’s degree or above,
while 25% have only a secondary or other non-degree tertiary education.
Description of data
Three sets of data were collected in this survey. The fi rst set focuses on
Christians’ general habits or patterns of using social media, including their
general habits when using diff erent kinds of social media and, specifi cally,
time spent, favourite type and preferred activities on Facebook. In addition
to investigating electronic means of social media, traditional forms of mass
media are also investigated to compare their impacts on those who do not
often access social media. The second set of data focuses on Christians’
political views and participation. We investigate Christians’ general views
on government and specifi c views on the recent anti-extradition bill issue.
Besides their opinions and stances, we also look into their level of political
participation, ranging from participating in petitions and demonstrations
to making donations. Through this, we hope we can understand the intensity of their beliefs beyond their views. The third set of data focuses on
Christians’ interpretation of some controversial verses of the Bible. These
verses are chosen because, fi rst, they are relatively more well known, which
reduces the impact of people referring to them in a misinformed manner. These verses are also often quoted by diff erent camps of believers or
discussed defending one group’s views or attacking the views of opposing
camps. Sometimes, they are quoted by two opposing camps according to
completely diff erent understandings and defi nitions.
The social media use patterns of Hong Kong Christians
The aim of this section is to identify the basic pattern of Hong Kong
Christians in using social media, including their intensity, type of social
media used more often and the most frequent activities done on Facebook.
These patterns indicate the likelihood that social media aff ects their interpretation of the social and cultural situation and ideology based on our
hypothesis concerning the data usage of social media companies in the era
of Big Data.
38
Алекс Хон-Хо. Методологический обзор цифровой теологии и исследование...
Hours spent on the Internet: The most frequent option is 3–4 hours
per day for personal use, chosen by 333 out of 780 respondents (42.7%).
The second option is 1–2 hours per day, the choice of 262 out of 780 people (33.6%). The third option is 5–6 hours per day. There are 100 out of
780 respondents (12.8%) who spend less than an hour on the Internet. The
fi rst three options accounts for the 88% of the total respondents. The rest
responded to use more than 7 hours or above. Therefore, the weighted
average hours spent on the Internet are 3.7 hours per day for personal use,
which is consistent with another survey conducted by Global Web Index
that Hong Kong people spend 3 hours 22 minutes, which is 3.67 hours per
1
day
. This is a ranking of 27th among 40 countries or regions surveyed and
is slightly lower than the world average of 3 hours 28 minutes
2
. The most
popular means of accessing the Internet is through mobile phones, which
was the choice of 616 out of 780 respondents (79%). The second is desktop
computers, at 104 out of 780 (13.3%). The third is laptop computers, at 52
out of 780 (6.6%). This shows that the infl uence of mobile phones is the
most signifi cant, and the more popular mobile has the higher impact of
social media on personal life.
The most frequently used social media is WhatsApp, by 520 out of
780 participants (66.7%), and the second is Facebook, by 193 out of 780
(24.7%). These two shared more than 90% of the researched population.
Since many people use more than one social media, the survey also asked
them what is their second most often used social media. In this category,
Facebook is the most frequently used, by 408 out of 780 (52.3%). WhatsApp is the second in this category, by 209 out of 780 (26.8%). Instagram
is the third most popular, with 104 out of 780 (13.3%). This shows that
Facebook and WhatsApp are still the most popular social media used by
the researched population. The importance of Instagram is increasing as
well. As explained in the Big Data section, Facebook owns WhatsApp,
and they can personalise your account and get access to your information in both forms of social media. The result is that they can predict your
preference more accurately. Concerning the time spent using social media, the most frequent choice is 1–2 hours, for 345 out of 780 participants
(44%), 225 chose 3–4 hours (29%) and 97 chose less than 1 hour (12%).
1
‘How much time does YOUR country spend online?’ Mail Online, accessed
1 April, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6658237/How-timedoes-country-spend-online.html
2
Ibid.
39
Христианство и глобальные сети
The average time spent on social media therefore is 3 hours 23 minutes,
which is higher than the world average of 2 hours 22 minutes, according
to a research
1
. The reason may be due to the high penetration rate of using
mobile phones in Hong Kong. In 2019, Hong Kong’s smartphone penetration rate was 77%, which is higher than China’s rate of 60%, which is the
highest penetration rate ranking by country
2
. It is also consistent with our
survey that 79% of 780 people responded that they use smartphones most
often as the online device.
In light of the habit of using Facebook, the survey asked what is the most
frequent action the respondents do on Facebook and asked them to rank
the top fi ve of their activities. The question gives 12 choices, including realtime communication, update status, reading friends’ status, reading news,
reading entertainment information, sharing friends’ status, sharing news,
sharing entertainment news, following pages, reading groups, shopping
and others. The top three choices of their fi rst choice are reading news (380
out of 780), reading friends’ status (221 out of 780) and live communication
(48 out of 780). The top three choices of their second choice are reading
news (214 out of 780), reading friends’ status (176 out of 780) and sharing
news (138 out of 780). The top three choices of their third choice are reading friends’ news (125 out of 780), reading entertainment news (123 out of
780) and following pages (101 out of 780). The top three choices of their
fourth choice, starting to spread more even among the 12 choices, following pages (113 out of 780), sharing friends’ status (96 out of 780) and reading entertainment news (91 out of 780). The top three choices of their fi fth
choice, spreading even more even among the 12 choices, update status (99
out of 780), real-time communication (90 out of 780), and sharing friends’
status (74 out of 780).
In short, the habit of using social media among Hong Kong Christians
is very intensive in terms of the time they spend on social media. Such
intensity supports the hypothesis that the use of social media could be a
1
‘Daily time spent on social networking by internet users worldwide from 2012
to 2019’ Statista, accessed 21 April, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/
daily-social-media-usage-worldwide
2
‘Top Countries by Smartphone Users’ NewZoo, accessed 2 April, 2020, https://
newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-countries-by-smartphone-penetration-andusers; ‘Smartphone Penetration as Share of the Population in Hong Kong from 2015
to 2023’, Statista, accessed 2 April, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/625415/
smartphone-user-penetration-in-hong-kong
40
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]