Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority - Chapter 5

Dr. Campbell, director of the Network, explores the interactions between digital innovators and religious organization and institutions, in her latest book: Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority (Routledge 2020). Here we provide a glimpse into her insights shared in the book on how digital creatives with religious motivations and digital media experts working the churches are challenging traditional notions of what it means to have religious authority in a digital age. The following blog post is an edited excerpt from a chapter appearing in Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority give our readers a unique insights into her arguments and findings shared in the book.

Chapter 5: Digital Spokespersons

Digital spokespersons […] are religious digital creatives (RDCs) working on behalf of a specific religious institution or community. A key part of their work is presenting and representing that group’s identity in the media, especially on digital-media platforms. This may be done by designing the group’s informational website, managing social-media sites representing the group online or moderating online discussions related to their institution. This category of digital creatives draws on Anderson’s notion of “spokesperson-activists,” or those who seek to present the face of an established religious institution online. Anderson’s category, as outlined in Chapter 3, included both those who are appointed by leaders of groups to be their online representatives and individuals who become the public face of their community because of the media and technology work they do for the institution. These spokesperson-activists, as Anderson described them, hold jobs such as communication or information officers, webmasters, press liaisons or even personal assistants serving specific religious leaders, positions that require them to regularly liaise between the media, the public and their institution. Thus, they are charged with overseeing the online presence and reputation of the group for which they work.
From these interviews, we see three common groups of digital spokespersons present within most religious denominations and organizations: (1) media officers and communication directors, (2) webmasters and technology teams and (3) online ambassadors.
Increasingly, religious denominations employ communication directors and media officers to play specific roles related to the production and management of communication services within their organizations. For the most part, communication directors take on a number of key roles, including overseeing the production of media resources related to the work and mission of the institution, as well as managing the flow of information within the institution—especially between church leaders, staff and members—and strategic information sharing about the organization with external sources.

Institutional webmasters and technology-team members also work as digital spokespersons in that they are paid to carry out specific digital-media work for their religious denominations or organizations. Their work is primarily technical in nature and focused on tasks such as maintaining official media platforms or producing content for media resources. They typically work under the supervision of the communication directors or media officers described earlier, yet their work plays an important part in representing the official identity of their group within the digital environment.

A third type of digital spokesperson also identified in this research can be described as online media ambassador. These individuals play the role of digital spokespersons within online or other media forums. Like the others described earlier, they are directly employed by denominations and religious organizations, but their primary role is not focused on church communication or media production. Rather, online media ambassadors are recognized high-level church leaders, such as presiding bishops or other denominational leaders who oversee other church leaders, essentially serving as a pastor to pastors in their church organization. These individuals’ oversight role requires them to be institutional experts. Part of their role involves internal institutional communication with individuals under their oversight. Their position, combined with these communication skills, means they are often called upon to speak on behalf of their institution or area of oversight when public issues emerge of interest to those outside the church.

Digital spokespersons can also be described as institutional identity curators. Their jobs require them to represent and frame the identity of their particular religious group online through digital content and resources. Increasingly, religious organizations are seeing digital-media work as related to their institutional public relations, requiring them to hire spokespersons to manage their online media or presence. Identity curators mirror what Anderson described as “spokesperson- activists,” talking heads of religious groups that draw on established interpretive patterns and structures from their institutions to build the presence and identities of those groups in public digital spaces. The above overview of three types of digital spokespersons described in this chapter highlight a number of shared traits and tasks focused on their institutional identity curation online.

Excerpt taken from Campbell, H.A. (2020). Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority. Routledge. This book can be purchased through the publisher at: https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Creatives-and-the-Rethinking-of-Religi...