While shoveling the driveway this wintery morning I was musing on the number of ‘digital evangelists’ I know. This got me to thinking about the term ‘evangelist’. Of course it’s tied to religion and has associated with it images of faith healers and stadium-sized ministries. Many religious evangelists speak of Creationism and Intelligent Design. They disdain theories of evolution or inquiries of science that aim to explain those phenomenon they believe to be the work of a higher power.
Most popular religious evangelists are of extreme faith. It is all consuming. And of course, it you don’t share their faith, there is great judgement.
To that end, I think ‘digital evangelists’ are as potentially dangerous as the religious sort. They too have extreme (and in my opinion, blinding) faith in new technologies. Using blogs and other channels they try to build stadium-sized ministries of believers. They assume, as do religious evangelists, that everyone is or wants to be like them. Convinced they have an insight into a ‘universal truth’ they are compelled to preach it to the lost masses around them.
Digital evangelists are also of extreme faith. It too is all consuming. And of course, if you don’t share their faith, you are judged to be an unenlightened Luddite.
But like Intelligent Design, digital evangelists tend to select small pieces of information, often provided by sympathetic sources, which they present in a manner that supports an idea they hold to be true.
In terms of the adoption, usage and impacts of digital social media, I have found it exceedingly difficult to find simple statistics these days. There is no shortage of hype or exaggeration. There is an avalanche of hyperbole and plenty of ‘sponsored’ survey information, but there are no (that I could find) readily available attempts at scientific rigor.
Where are the seekers of contrarian information? Where are the myth busters and devil’s advocates (to use a religious allusion)? Where are the academic, unbiased, reasoned inquiries into exactly how all this new-fangled technology is impacting us?
For example, we’ve had RSS for years, and yet its very hard to find statistics as to how many people a.) know what it is b.) know how to configure it and c.) use it in any meaningful way.
Similarly, Twitter, Second Life, Facebook, and Delicious all receive volumes of press, speculation and evangelical froth, but it is very hard to find attempts at objective analysis of the usage patterns of these technologies. (Obviously you can’t take the company’s self-published information at face value.)
Without knowing for sure how people are using the technologies we already have, are we well-informed enough to improve on them?
Does anyone know an academic institution applying scientific rigor to the study of the use of social media among differing ethnic and socio-economic groups? I would be very interested to hear about this. Most of what I find readily available is either sponsored (and therefore immediately suspect) or purely opinion dressed up in scientific language (a la ‘Intelligent Design’).
The world needs fewer digital evangelists and more digital scientists.
Former classmates I reconnected with at my high school reunion prompted me to join Facebook after years of resistance on my part. So I joined. Admittedly it’s novel and amusing right now. And it’s nice reconnecting with old friends and seeing who else is out there. But it also underscored a thought I’ve had recently concerning what’s ‘New’ and what to do ‘Now’.
