Twitter and Church - Accessible and Problematic ~ Praxis Habitus - On Race Religion & Culture

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Twitter and Church - Accessible and Problematic

An interesting article in The New York Times shows how the accessibility of Twitter can make it problematic for religious use.

Turns out it's hard to keep the devotional content free of the riff-raff.


From Lead Us to Tweet, and Forgive the Trespassers,
While hundreds of worshipers watched the traditional dramatization of the Crucifixion from pews in the church, one of New York’s oldest, thousands more around the world followed along on smartphones and computers as a staff member tweeted short bursts of dialogue and setting (“Darkness and earthquake,” “Crucify him!”).

The trouble began in the second hour.

Twitter’s interactivity — its essence — made it easy for an anonymous text-messager to insert an unscripted character into the Passion play:

a Roman guard who breezily claimed, “I’ve got dibs on his robe.”

When another texter introduced a rogue Mary Magdalene, the intrusion only confirmed the obvious: Twitter’s trademark limit of 140 characters per message is no bar against crudity.

The rest of the article is online.

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