Social media and religion: Missiological perspective on the link between Facebook and the emergence of prophetic churches in southern Africa

Kgatle, Mookgo Solomon

doi:10.4102/ve.v39i1.1848

Cited by 31 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Several studies suggest that the features of social media platforms play an important role in terms of maintaining traditional cultural values as well as forming new ones [14,43,50,54,55,57,62]. Exemplifying the first case, Holmes, Balnaves, and Wang [36] argue that WeChat leads Chinese society "towards traditional Chinese values" rather than "Western-style democracy" (p.9).…”

Section: Cultural Affordances Of Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Affordances and Social Media

Sun¹,

Suthers²

2021

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper first reviews the development and application of affordances theory in the field of social media studies. Then, it examines the significance and limitations of the original meaning of affordances of the environment that is provided by American psychologist James Gibson. The paper argues that the cultural aspect of affordances has been understated and should be included as part of affordances theory. To enrich theoretical understanding of affordances and further facilitate empirical studies of social media affordances, the paper offers a novel definition of cultural affordances that bridges cultural studies and social media studies. The new definition of cultural affordances includes two layers, which are cultural affordances of technology and affordances of the cultural. Later, the paper provides examples to showcase how this novel definition can be applied in prior empirical studies with a focus on WeChat. 2. Social Media Affordances: Divergence and Convergence 2.1. Platform-centered Social Media Affordance Prior studies of affordances of ICTs demonstrate a tendency to centralize properties of a technology and focus on how it affects social interaction [37, 38, 93]. Gaver [25] defines technology affordances as independent, inherent, and physical properties of an object that are compatible with a user for possible action. Wellman et al. [94] states that affordances of the Internet, such as boarder bandwidth, portability, connectivity, facilitate networked individualism. Kreijin [46] states that social affordances are properties in a computer-mediated environment that facilitates learners' social interaction. Research demonstrates the same inclination when developing the theory of affordances in the field of social media studies. Graves [26] claims that read input, fixity and juxtaposition are the affordances of blogging, which have "a democratizing influence … making journalists more accountable to their audiences" (p.344). boyd [10] argues that networked technology inducts structural

show abstract

Section: Cultural Affordances Of Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Affordances and Social Media

Sun¹,

Suthers²

2021

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In religious point of view, the use of social media is making a significant contribution to the development of religious values. That is, the linkage between religion and social media has attracted many people over the years, including religious scholars and priests [27]. Despite of these advantages, abusive activities on religion can not be ignored.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identification of Abusive Behavior Towards Religious Beliefs and Practices on Social Media Platforms

Ahammad¹,

Uddin²,

Yesmin³

et al. 2021

IJACSA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ubiquitous use of social media has enabled many people, including religious scholars and priests, to share their religious views. Unfortunately, exploiting people's religious beliefs and practices, some extremist groups intentionally or unintentionally spread religious hatred among different communities and thus hamper social stability. This paper aims to propose an abusive behavior detection approach to identify hatred, violence, harassment, and extremist expressions against people of any religious belief on social media. For this, first religious posts from social media users' activities are captured and then the abusive behaviors are identified through a number of sequential processing steps. In the experiment, Twitter has been chosen as an example of social media for collecting dataset of six major religions in English Twittersphere. In order to show the performance of the proposed approach, five classic classifiers on n-gram TF-IDF model have been used. Besides, Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) classifiers on trained embedding and pre-trained GloVe word embedding models have been used. The experimental result showed 85% accuracy in terms of precision. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that will be able to distinguish between hateful and non-hateful contents in other application domains on social media in addition to religious context.

show abstract

“…Social media interactions between believers and non-believers affect how non-believers think and feel about the church, and consequently these interactions can lead to the positive WOM, affecting the conversion of non-believers. We can find and measure external factors based on responses on social media such as Facebook affecting the sustainability of the church population [73][74][75][76]. In future study, we can discuss the sustainability of the church population on the COVID-19 SIR SD framework using the time-dependent sustainable potential obtained from social media communication.…”

Section: Supporting Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainability of religious communities

Jo¹,

Kim

Lee

2021

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article focuses on the relationship between church population and sustainability. We carried out the study on a sample of Presbyterian churches in South Korea, and implemented dynamic optimization of the church population based on the Susceptible–Infected–Recovered (SIR) epidemic model. In particular, System Dynamics (SD) and Agent-Based Model (ABM) simulations are performed for a prototype model with key parameters that contribute to church growth. Potential parameters reflecting sustainability for churches trigger dramatic growth in church populations. We categorized five dimensions of sustainability with various multi-dimensional indicators in order to measure the level of sustainability, and we obtained the values of the indicators by analyzing a number of news articles searched with a text mining technique. As time-dependent values of sustainability are imposed on the generic SD model for church population dynamics as sustainable potential parameters, the optimized result reproduces specific features for the church population. We discuss the roles of key parameters for sustainable church growth, and the contributions of the churches to sustainability.

show abstract

Social media and religion: Missiological perspective on the link between Facebook and the emergence of prophetic churches in southern Africa

Cited by 31 publications

References 11 publications

Cultural Affordances and Social Media

Cultural Affordances and Social Media

Identification of Abusive Behavior Towards Religious Beliefs and Practices on Social Media Platforms

Sustainability of religious communities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About