Building Ethics Conscious Citizenship from Academic Honesty
3. Resultados
3.3. Configuración de ciudadanos/as con valores éticos
Passing the turn of the millennium, human society is undergoing a very dynamic process induced by an array of historical events such as technological revolution, global economy, the decline of Marxism-Leninism, the diffusion of postmodern lifestyle, and new forms of relationships between state, economy, and civil society. Unlike the previous transition of industrialization driven by labour-saving mechanical technology, information technology is playing such a significant role in the current social transformation that
‘information society’ has become a catchword of our time. There exist a large number of social-scientific studies dealing with the societal transformation attributable to new information technology (see, for instance, Castells 1996;
Kling 1996; Lyon 1988; and Webster 1995). Among a large body of special-ized research studies, only a few authors, however, have attempted a broad historical sweep and bold theorizing. To my knowledge, Manuel Castells seems to be the most remarkable.
In his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Castells concludes a decade of research by presenting an empirically grounded, cross-cultural account of major social, economic, and political transformations which have reshaped the landscapes of human knowledge and experience across the globe. The basic model underlying his trilogy is a dialectical inter-action of social relations and technology, or, in Castells’s terminology,
‘modes of production’ and ‘modes of development’. Admitting that the evolution of the capitalist mode of production is driven by private capital’s competitive pressure to maximize profits, Castells makes it clear that modes of development evolve according to their own logic. He defines the evolution-ary logic of the current ‘informational modes of development’ according to the ‘information technology paradigm’. The characteristics of the ‘infor-mation technology paradigm’ described by Castells are: (1) Infor‘infor-mation is the raw material as well as the outcome. The new technologies act on information rather than on matter. (2) Because information is an integral part of all human activity, these technologies are pervasive. (3) Information technologies foster a networking logic, because they allow one to deal with complexity and unpredictability, which are themselves increased by these
technologies. (4) The networking logic is based on flexibility. (5) Specific technologies converge into highly integrated systems (Castells 1996: 60–65).
Social transformation driven by advanced information technologies never occurs in a gradual and continuous fashion. It is widely open to sectional, functional, and temporal variations. Taking all those variations into account, I construct a progressive model of social informatization (see fig. 9.1). The initial phase called ‘computerization stage’ is a state characterized by the construction of technological infrastructure including the installation of computer hardware. The effect of computerization lies in automating repetitive tasks and reducing working time and expenditure of energy. The information technology at this stage remains instrumental in so far as it involves the enhancement of job efficiency without influencing other aspects of human activities. Next follows the ‘networking stage’ where computing and telecommunication functions are incorporated. At this stage, the fusion of computing and telecommunication technologies constitutes an extensive
‘informational grid’ linking people, homes, schools, factories, offices, shops, banks, hospitals, etc. In the third ‘flexibility stage’, ‘borderlessness’ emerges as the most prevalent phenomenon. Until the modern industrial era, divisions between groups, organizations, sectors, regions, nations were rather clear-cut Online Buddhist Community 139
Automation Society
Network Society
Flexible
Society Cybersociety
Cyber-Stage Computerization
Stage
Networking Stage
Flexibility Stage Technological
Techno-Social
Techno-Socio-Cultural Techno-Socio-Culturo-Psychic
Figure 9.1 Developmental model of information society.
and often legally protected. But an extraordinary increase in the social net-working tends to dissolve those divisions. Massive exchange of information beyond the time-space limitation dissociates those boundaries.
The pinnacle of the informatization process as far as I see it is ‘cyber-stage’, an outcome of the fusion of advanced information technology and multi-media technology. Compared to the previous three stages – computerization, networking, and flexibility – the last cyber-stage looks far more epochal, since cyberspace can be perceived as a timeless, boundless space of a high degree of freedom (Kim 1999: 77–82). Cyberspace, the constitutive element of cyber society, is defined as a conceptual space of interaction where people using computer-mediated communication technology interact. Cyberspace is the place of anonymous encounter as well. It is characterized by a multilateral-multiplicative structure of hyperlinks. Further, cyberspace is atemporal and aspatial in the sense that it is not bound up with time or space. But the most distinguishable trait of cyberspace may be its virtual property (Loader 1997).
That is why the term cyberspace is often used interchangeably with virtual reality.
Religion in the information age
Sociologists who have studied the relationship between religion and modern society have articulated at least three functions of religion. These three sets of religious functions can be characterized as interpretative, interactive, and integrative functions respectively. The interpretative function has to do with the ability of religion to provide meaningful answers to ultimate and eternal questions about human existence. Basically, people in modern society are living under conditions of uncertainty and insecurity, and the capacity of each individual to control the conditions of his or her life is very limited.
Being perplexed in such a situation, some people feel the necessity of some sort of explanation, and in some such cases religion may offer the prospect or hope of spiritual intercession (O’Dea 1966). Also, religion can function to legitimate, that is to provide justification for, an existing social order.
Religion does this by reinterpreting the realities of everyday life as part of a greater cosmic scheme. By placing everyone’s daily existence in the context of a broader system of order, religion makes the status quo seem difficult or impossible to change (Berger 1967). The interactive function of religion has to do with the ability of religious organizations to provide opportunities for some people to associate with others with whom they can exchange ideas, benefits, lifestyles, tastes, and so forth. On the basis of study of Western converts to Eastern religions, H. Cox (1977) argues that what people are looking for is friendship, companionship, acceptance, and recognition, and, for some people in modern society, membership of a religious organization provides a sense of community making it easier to cope with either loneliness or isolation. In addition to the interpretative and the interactive aspects of 140 Mun-Cho Kim
religious life, religion does also have an integrative function; it is a form of social ‘cement’ integrating believers by regularly bringing them together to enact various rituals and by providing them with shared values and beliefs that bind them together into a unified moral community (Durkheim 1947: 47).
On the basis of this tripartite classification scheme, it may be possible as well to differentiate types of religious communities into ‘Belief Community’,
‘Relational Community’, and ‘Affective Community’ in which ‘need for otherness’, ‘need for affiliation’, and ‘need for collective identity’ respectively prevail. Religion, in sum, can be seen as a means of making communion, and, to the extent that most religious expressions take the form of communication, they have been accompanied by relevant means of communication as well.
In any case, during history, religious individuals, groups, and institutions have quickly encompassed almost every new communication technology. The Christian Bible may be one of the noticeable products. Thanks to Gutenberg’s printing press, fifteenth-century Europeans were able to get access to the religious documents that were formerly available only to the wealthy. Radio and television had a remarkable impact upon religion as well. With the advent of those mass broadcasting technologies, people started to think of them-selves as audience or customers rather than participants. Consequently, their expectations of the quality of the worship event increased (Brasher 2001:
15–16). The popularity of mega-churches soared; religious programmes were broadcast in many cities; televised worship drew on local and national television audiences; cable television and its satellite distribution provided even greater scope for evangelical use. Needless to say, the Internet is playing a powerful role in religious communications as well.
The Internet provides immediate access to a wide range of religious information, usually more quickly than do the traditional channels of distribution. The Internet also provides means for candid discussions that are relatively free from the influence of pre-existing religious authorities. In addition, owing to its virtual character, the Internet contains interactive environments that facilitate the unfolding of religious experiences and ideas of various kinds. But more than anything else, as indicated in table 9.1, only within cyberspace do we have at once highly private, focused, and multi-way communications. Accordingly, the Internet could be expected to be the imagined locale where people can find alternative spiritual sanctuaries with few speech restrictions.
Studying online religious communication in Korea
To date, only a small number of studies have been reported concerning the issue of online religious communication in Korea (e.g., Park 2000, Kim 2000). Unfortunately, these studies have been either very preliminary case Online Buddhist Community 141
descriptions or illusive conceptual discussions. The present study may be the first and only analysis of online Buddhist communication in Korea that seeks to combine empirical and theoretical approaches.
With the rapid expansion of the information highway in Korea driven by ambitious National Information Infrastructure policy, the commercial telecommunication network began to flourish in the early 1990s. Four major information service providers – Chollian, Hitel, Nownuri, and Unitel – appeared thereafter in Korea. With regard to the present study twenty-four online religious communities were initially found in these major information service providers. The distribution with respect to religious denomination of the twenty-four online religious communities is summarized in table 9.2.
Korean Buddhist communities on the Internet in 1997 included BUD (abbreviation of Buddhism), BOSAL (Korean for the Buddhist term
‘Bodhisattva’), and Won BUD in Chollian as well as BUD in Hitel, BUD in Nownuri, and BUD in Unitel. The Chollian, Hitel, Nownuri and Unitel portals remained major information service providers in Korea until 1997, just before the massive diffusion of the Internet.
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Table 9.1 Media characteristics with regard to the attributes of communication Medium Attribute
Privacy Audience Direction Temporality
Internet High Focused Multi-way Variable
Phone High Focused 2-way Immediate
Mail High Focused 2-way Delayed
Radio Low Broad 1-way Immediate
TV Low Broad 1-way Immediate
Print Low Broad 1-way Delayed
Source: Revised version of Boehlefeld (1996: 147).
Table 9.2 Number of religious communities within major Korean information service providers in 1997
Religion Chollian Hitel Nownuri Unitel Total
Protestant 3 1 3 2 9
Catholic 1 1 1 1 4
Buddhism 2 1 1 1 5
Won Buddhism 1 0 0 0 1
Unification Church 0 1 0 0 1
Other 1 1 1 1 4
Total 8 5 6 5 24
Source: Summarized version of Park (1997: 4–5).
In terms of methodology, a triangulation strategy, combining methods of content analysis, participatory observation, and interview, was adopted for the present study, focusing primarily on the Chollian Buddhist Community (C-BUD). Content analysis of the information exchange in this commu-nity was conducted in order to figure out basic communication patterns.
Participatory observations were carried out to discover what was going on in chat rooms and various offline meetings. Interviews with past and current executive members were also included for more valid interpretations. The data were collected between September 1996 and August 1997. It was the time when most online communities based on independent information service providers were incorporated into huge search engines or portal sites.
More recent web-based online communications are not included in this study.
Chollian Buddhist Community
The Chollian Buddhist Community (C-BUD) was formed on 6 September 1991. C-BUD, consisting of more than three hundred subcommunities, was regarded as one of the most successful online religious communities in Korea until the late 1990s when web-based online communities began to emerge.
The three main menus of C-BUD as well as a supporting menu and the submenus belonging to them are listed in table 9.3.
Nowadays, most online communities are located via search engines or portal sites. Complying with this new trend, C-BUD members decided to transform their online community into a web-based one and launched their own website on the Internet on 30 August 2001 (see www.buddhasite.net).
Although many religious communities have their own sites, most online religious communities in the early 1990s were registered only in a specific search engine or portal site. However, C-BUD had its own service solution with an independent domain. That is apparently one of the reasons why C-BUD has been most successful in soliciting loyalty from its members and maintaining a solid group identity. Thus, contrary to café-type religious
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Table 9.3 Menus and submenus in the Chollian Buddhist Community (C-BUD)
Main menu Supporting menu
Learning sector Relieving sector Sharing sector Office sector LS1: Beginner RS1: Café SS1: Sermon OS1: Newsletter LS2: Counselling RS2: Inner Circle SS2: Meditation OS2: Newcomer LS3: Holy Texts RS3: Personal Affairs SS3: Buddhist Culture OS3: Membership LS4: Debate RS4: Guesthouse SS4: Event OS4: Management
RS5: Open Letter SS5: Library OS5: Voting RS6: Chat Room
Source: Rearranged version of Park (1997: 46).
communities simply providing scriptures, liturgies, and news, C-BUD has developed into a multi-pattern, alternative religious organization with interpretative and integrative as well as interactive functions.
Not far from the general patterns of Internet users around 1997, male users in their twenties and thirties turned out to be the majority of the C-BUD members: 71.8 percent of all members of the club who took part in the survey were males. Age distributions of the 1,146 members who registered at C-BUD between April and October 1997 are summarized in table 9.4.
Besides, among the 530 members of the C-BUD whose occupations were identifiable, college students occupied the highest proportion (32.1 per cent) and next followed white-collar workers (23.2 per cent), professionals (8.7 per cent) and middle/high school students (7.7 per cent) in sequence.
The monthly connection time amounted to 903 hours and 33 minutes in March 1996 and 1819 hours and 37 minutes in September 1997. The average connection time was 51 hours and 46 minutes in March 1996 and 58 hours and 32 minutes in September 1997. The fact that busy daily workers were actively committed to online religious communications may be evidence that implies the constitution of alternative religious organizations in cyber-space.
The explicit purposes of the major online menus of the C-BUD tend to bifurcate into either ‘intimacy’ or ‘information’. For instance, menus such as ‘Café’, ‘Open Letter’, and ‘Personal Affairs’ apparently were designed to facilitate intimacy, while ‘Sermon’, ‘Meditation’, ‘Beginner’, and ‘Bible Study’ seemingly were intended to increase the level of religious information transmission or exchange. On the other hand, ‘Chat Room’ aimed at dual functions of intimacy and information, while ‘Debate’ seemed to encompass both information exchange and some sort of religious practice.
Besides those online communication activities, there were also several offline activities in the C-BUD such as ‘Cohort Meeting’, ‘Abrupt Meeting’,
‘Regional Meeting’, ‘Community Service’, and ‘Regular Communion’.
Apparently, ‘Cohort Meeting’ and ‘Abrupt Meeting’ aimed at increasing intimacy, while ‘Community Service’ was intended for enhancing or giving opportunities of conducting religious practice. Two other offline activities,
‘Regional Meeting’ and ‘Short-term Retreat’, were supposed to meet a triple purpose – intimacy, information, and religious practice. The major online communications and offline activities with respect to their expected purpose are illustrated in fig. 9.2.
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Table 9.4 Age composition of membership of the Chollian Buddhist Community in 1997
Age –19 20–29 30–39 40–49 50 + Total
% 8.0 56.7 26.7 7.5 1.1 100.0
Source: Park (1997: 24). N = 1146.
Past studies of virtual communities propose that: (1) the development of virtual communities can be explained as an indication of declining traditional community, (2) community ties are to be consolidated when people meet on a regular basis in cyberspace, (3) the members of a virtual community meet online to do just about everything that other people do in face-to-face interactions (Jones 1995; Smith and Kollock 1999). This case study of an online Buddhist community has been carried out in order to investi-gate those propositions. Users’ characteristics, formal structure, and verbal/
behavioral activities were examined. In general, strong empirical evidence supporting the propositions was obtained.
Then, online communications and activities of the Chollian Buddhist Community were analysed in terms of the three basic functions of religion discussed above. By and large, three main menus that comprise the substan-tive part of the Chollian Buddhist Community, ‘Learning Sector’, ‘Relieving Sector’, and ‘Sharing Sector’, seemed to exactly match the three basic functions of religion that were designated earlier, that is the interpretative, the interactive, and the integrative function respectively. Simultaneously, five submenus of the supporting menu – from ‘Office Sector’ 1 to 5 – could be deployed into these three basic functions of religion (see fig. 9.3). However, when we further investigate the contents of actual online communications performed within each submenu, we can draw the conclusion that not all the submenu activities are equivalent to what their top menus originally designated. What is going on in ‘Inner Circle’ and ‘Personal Affairs’ in actual Online Buddhist Community 145
Open Letter Personal Affairs
Café Sermon
Meditation Beginner Bible Study
Chat Room Debate
Regional Meeting Community Service Cohort Meeting
Abrupt Meeting
Short-term Retreat Online
Communication
Offline Activity
Intimacy Information
Exchange
Religious Practice
Figure 9.2 Intended purposes of major online/offline activities in the Chollian Buddhist Community (C-BUD).
practice does belong to the category of integrative function, and so do the activities of ‘Sermon’ and ‘Meditation’ to the category of interpretative function. Noticeably, part of the activities of ‘Buddhist Culture’, ‘Event’,
‘Newsletter’, ‘Newcomer’, and ‘Membership’ seem to have an instrumental function rather than an integrative or system-operating function, in as much as these activities focus quite a lot on the possibilities of giving monetary contributions and practical assistance to the club (see fig. 9.3).
While more than 80 per cent of the whole population in Korea is concen-trated in cities, most Buddhist churches (temples) are still scattered in rural mountainous areas. Therefore, for busy full-time workers, it is difficult to visit a temple on a regular basis, and that is why Korean Buddhism is said to suffer from an ‘elder/female excess phenomenon’. In this situation, the Chollian Buddhist Community (C-BUD) seems to have gained the interest of many people who regard offline meetings as too demanding. To a certain extent C-BUD even seems to constitute a possible alternative to some pre-existing religious organizations. Particularly, the openness and anonymity of most online communications promote active participation by members who 146 Mun-Cho Kim
Function & Community Type Formal Menu Activity
Learning Sector
Figure 9.3 Functions and functional relocation of the Chollian Buddhist Community (C-BUD).
might feel reluctant to participate in formalized offline patterns of worship.
To its members, the online religious co-experiences of the C-BUD with like-minded individuals seem to have a great influence on their everyday lives (Kim and Park 1998).
Conclusion
In all, the findings of the present study suggest that the Chollian Buddhist Community from 1996 to 1997 performed multiple functions: (1) as a ‘Belief Community’ providing a system of Buddhist beliefs and practices, (2) as a ‘Relational Community’ that helps to satisfy the need for belonging for some people, (3) as an ‘Affective Community’ that provides a kind of group identity for those who seek it, and (4) as a ‘Utilitarian Community’ providing a means of resource mobilization. The results of the study make a plea for
In all, the findings of the present study suggest that the Chollian Buddhist Community from 1996 to 1997 performed multiple functions: (1) as a ‘Belief Community’ providing a system of Buddhist beliefs and practices, (2) as a ‘Relational Community’ that helps to satisfy the need for belonging for some people, (3) as an ‘Affective Community’ that provides a kind of group identity for those who seek it, and (4) as a ‘Utilitarian Community’ providing a means of resource mobilization. The results of the study make a plea for