Heidi A. Campbell (born August 26, 1970) is a professor of communications at Texas A&M University. [1] She is known for her work in digital religion, and studies related to religion and new media. [2] [3]
Campbell received her BA in Communication from Spring Arbor University in Michigan (1992), an MTh in Theology and Ethics of Communication from the University of Edinburgh (1997), and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2002) where she studied the intersection of Computer-Mediated Communication and Practical Theology. Her PhD thesis was entitled "Investigating Community Through an Analysis of Christian Email Online Communities", which was revised and published as her first book entitled Exploring Religious Community Online (2005). [4]
Campbell was appointed assistant professor of communications in the Department of Community at Texas A&M in 2005, and became full professor in 2018. Since 2010, she has also been affiliated with the Texas A&M's department of Religious Studies. [1]
In her book When Religion Meets New Media (2010), [5] Campbell developed the Religious-Social Shaping of Technology (RSST) approach to examine religious user communities negotiation processes related to media technologies. This approach builds upon ideas drawn the social shaping of technology (SST), which sees technological change and user innovation as a social process. RSST views the interrelationship between religious groups and new technologies as a dialectical process, in which the ethos and identity of a religious groups dictates expectations regarding members’ engagement with new media.
A key premise underlying the RSST is that religious communities typically do not reject new forms of technology outright, rather they undergo a sophisticated negotiation process based on their communal background and beliefs. This informs their response to the various affordances offered by a given technology and potential impacts they perceive it may have on their community. The RSST approach employs four layers of investigation within a community:
In her study, the RSST approach was used in a variety of case studies such as the Amish response to technology, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish use of the "Kosher" phone, Christian and Baháʼí use of the Internet, and modern Islamic discourses about computers. [5]
Campbell has contributed to the study of "digital religion", which finds itself at the intersection of new media, religion and digital culture. Often seen as a subfield within Internet studies, digital religion is concerned with not only the practice of religion online, but also in how religious communities interact with media and negotiate their online and the offline existence. [6]
As an effort to create an international interdisciplinary conversation related digital religion, Campbell established the "Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies." [7]
Campbell also edited a number of open-access eBooks related to the COVID-19 pandemic:
New media are communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for the influx of interactive CD-ROMs for entertainment and education. The new media technologies, sometimes known as Web 2.0, include a wide range of web-related communication tools such as blogs, wikis, online social networking, virtual worlds, and other social media platforms.
Technorealism is an attempt to expand the middle ground between techno-utopianism and Neo-Luddism by assessing the social and political implications of technologies so that people might all have more control over the shape of their future. An account cited that technorealism emerged in the early 1990s and was introduced by Douglas Rushkoff and Andrew Shapiro. In the Technorealism manifesto, which described the term as a new generation of cultural criticism, it was stated that the goal was not to promote or dismiss technology but to understand it so the application could be aligned with basic human values. Technorealism suggests that a technology, however revolutionary it may seem, remains a continuation of similar revolutions throughout human history.
The Goddess movement is a revivalistic Neopagan religious movement which includes spiritual beliefs and practices that emerged primarily in the United States in the late 1960s and predominantly in the Western world during the 1970s. The movement grew as a reaction both against Abrahamic religions, which exclusively have gods who are referred to using masculine grammatical articles and pronouns, and secularism. It revolves around Goddess worship and the veneration for the divine feminine, and may include a focus on women or on one or more understandings of gender or femininity.
Religions are represented on the Internet in many ways. There are sites which attempt to cover all religions, traditions, and faiths, such as Patheos, Religious Tolerance, and Beliefnet. There are also sites that are specific to a religious tradition. Many sites are discussion groups, others host theological debates, and some provide advice concerning religious doctrine. Some sites aim to provide a religious experience facilitating prayer, meditation, or virtual pilgrimages. People also leverage search engines to investigate aspects of religion. Some religious websites are translated into several languages. For example, JW.ORG features content in over 1,000 languages.
The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, founded in 1997 and based in Oxford, England, is a research academy focused on the study and teaching of Hindu cultures of India and Nepal. It develops academic programmes of education, research and publishing in Hindu studies. It aims to encourage the Hindu community in the academic study of their own traditions and cultures. From 2006 to 2020, it was granted the status of a "recognised independent centre" working with the University of Oxford.
Digital anthropology is the anthropological study of the relationship between humans and digital-era technology. The field is new, and thus has a variety of names with a variety of emphases. These include techno-anthropology, digital ethnography, cyberanthropology, and virtual anthropology.
Digital rhetoric is communication that exists in the digital sphere. It can be expressed in many different forms, including text, images, videos, and software. Due to the increasingly mediated nature of contemporary society, distinctions between digital and non-digital environments are less clear. This has expanded the scope of digital rhetoric to account for the increased fluidity with which humans interact with technology.
Secular spirituality is the adherence to a spiritual philosophy without adherence to a religion. Secular spirituality emphasizes the inner peace of the individual, rather than a relationship with the divine. Secular spirituality is made up of the search for meaning outside of a religious institution; it considers one's relationship with the self, others, nature, and whatever else one considers to be the ultimate. Often, the goal of secular spirituality is living happily and/or helping others.
Religion and geography is the study of the impact of geography, i.e. place and space, on religious belief.
Mediatization is a method whereby the mass media influence other sectors of society, including politics, business, culture, entertainment, sport, religion, or education. Mediatization is a process of change or a trend, similar to globalization and modernization, where the mass media integrates into other sectors of the society. Political actors, opinion makers, business organizations, civil society organizations, and others have to adapt their communication methods to a form that suits the needs and preferences of the mass media. Any person or organization wanting to spread messages to a larger audience have to adapt their messages and communication style to make it attractive for the mass media.
The terms internet church, online church, cyberchurch, and digital church refer to a wide variety of ways that Christian religious groups can use the internet to facilitate their religious activities, particularly prayer, discussion, preaching and worship services. The internet has become a site for religious experience which has raised questions related to ecclesiology.
Lynn Schofield Clark is an American media critic and scholar whose research focuses on media studies and film studies. She is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver. She is author of several books and articles on the role social and visual media play in the lives of diverse U.S. adolescents. In her 2017 book co-authored with Regina Marchi, Young People and the Future of News, Clark and Marchi utilize an ethnographic approach to tell the stories of how young people engage with social media and legacy media both as producers and consumers of news. The book received the 2018 Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers and the 2018 James Carey Media Research Award from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research Clark's book regarding parenting in the digital age is titled The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age. Clark’s main contributions are in the areas of family media studies, media rich youth participatory action research and the mediatization (media) of world religions.
INFORM (Information Network Focus on Religious Movements) is an independent registered charity located in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King's College, London; from 1988-2018 it was based at the London School of Economics. It was founded by the sociologist of religion, Eileen Barker, with start-up funding from the British Home Office and Britain's mainstream churches. Its stated aims are to "prevent harm based on misinformation about minority religions and sects by bringing the insights and methods of academic research into the public domain" and to provide "information about minority religions and sects which is as accurate, up-to-date and as evidence-based as possible."
Stewart Mark Hoover is a Professor of Media Studies and Professor Adjoint of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the founder and director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. His research interest centers on media audience and reception studies rooted in cultural studies, anthropology and qualitative sociology. He is known for his work on media and religion, particularly in the phenomenon of televangelism, and later in religion journalism. His most recent work involves household-level studies of media audience practices of meaning-making and identity. Supported by a series of grants from the Lilly Endowment and the Ford Foundation, this work investigates the extent to which the media sphere as a whole and the various media which comprise it constitute a central site of meaning practice in contemporary domestic and global life. Through the center he directs, he has also become influential in scholarly discourses about the public understanding and role of religion globally and the ways those are rooted in its mediation.
Zizi Papacharissi is a Greek-American social scientist and professor. She is a UIC Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago. She also serves as the editor-in-chief of the journal Social Media + Society.
The study of religion and video games is a subfield of digital religion, which the American scholar of communication, Heidi Campbell, defines as "Religion that is constituted in new ways through digital media and cultures.". Video games once struggled for legitimacy as a cultural product, today, however, they are both business and art. Video games increasingly turn to religion not just as ornament but as core elements of their video game design and play. Games involve moral decision, rely on invented religions, and allow users to create and experience virtual religious spaces. As one of the newest forms of entertainment, however, there is often controversy and moral panic when video games engage religion, for instance, in Insomniac Games' use of the Manchester Cathedral in Resistance: Fall of Man. Concepts and elements of contemporary and ancient religions appear in video games in various ways: places of worship are a part of the gameplay of real-time strategy games like Age of Empires; narratively, games sometimes borrow themes from religious traditions like in Mass Effect 2.
Digital theology or cybertheology is the study of the relationship between theology and the digital technology.
Digital religion is the practice of religion in the digital world, and the academic study of such religious practice.
Gregory Price Grieve is an American historian of religions, academic and researcher. He is a Professor and Head of the Religious Studies Department at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Angela Coco is an Australian sociologist and academic whose primary research interests have been in the area of the sociology of religion, new religious movements, Catholicism, and Paganism.