After working for a ratings and review platform that rated green building products and services, I appreciated how much people depend on their peers for judgment and insight when making crucial decisions. A few months later, in my class on “The Anthropology of Religion,” I attempted to portray Yelp, the major ratings and review site on anything from restaurants to hair salons, as a form of religion a la Clifford Geertz’s definition. My primary argument was that Yelp was a collective representation of people’s experiences with a set business and that people who depend on Yelp implicitly trust and empathize the judgment and wisdom of their peers when they need guidance. On a grander level, I identified Yelp as a method to explain and shed light on the unknown (at least from the individual’s perspective).
To a great extent, we fall on this implicit trust in our activities and conversations, whether it’s getting guidance on a problem set, asking what movies or music to watch, or hounding a roommate or close friend with existential questions and musings.
In retrospect, calling Yelp a religion was a significant leap of faith on my part: after all, Yelp sought to simply share opinions and explain tangible experiences and services, from cups of coffee to the DJing at a set bar or club. For the most part, I have conceptualized religion as a system that attempts to explain the unknown or intangible. Regardless, this wave of online user-generated content and information sharing undoubtedly plays a crucial role in daily life: many individuals use the term “Web 2.0” to describe this phenomenon.
Wikipedia is a prime example of this; I certainly visit it as a dependable resource. When Saketh first told me about creating Swadharma as a blog, I became extremely excited as I thought this would be a great way to leverage a powerful market trend in order to create a resource and forum for self-identified and interested Hindus throughout the college campus scene. Initially, I saw Swadharma merely as students sharing their opinions and interpretations on religion, as a forum and community to discuss a variety of difficult, ambiguous questions and issues.
As I thought more about Swadharma, however, I came to realize why these issues (take vegetarianism and abstinence, for example) are so “ambiguous”: a lot of these questions depend on an individual’s will and inclinations. In a society or group, the individual will has to adapt in relation to the needs of the group: a spectrum of theorists discuss this, from Hobbes to Rousseau to Smith. Especially given our social interactions, we need some sort of benchmark or parameter to orient us when we are confused or entertain thoughts and desires distant from the norm.
Emile Durkheim examines this issue heavily in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim researched collective representations and rituals in primitive societies to purport that religion categorizes the world into sacred and profane, and as a result, naturally promotes order through standardizing the lens of interpretation.
I envision Swadharma as playing a crucial function in this process; beyond a discussion forum, Swadharma creates a collective norm, a benchmark, for individuals struggling with disconnects and challenges from their individual inclinations. In a sense, Swadharma is almost a Wikipedia of spirituality: while each individual writes a post from his perspective, the critical mass of content eventually sets up a collective representation, a backdrop against which we measure our individual wills. I would not go as far as to say that Swadharma defines an abstract general will. Religious questions, by my earlier reckoning, carry a certain element of the unknown that will always create room for debate. The reality that Swadharma and the issues it discusses have a level of ambiguity makes the process that much stronger.
When frequenting Swadharma and other blogs, individuals are actually searching for subjective interpretations rather than objective information and news. Swadharma is user-generated religion, “Religion 2.0”, and it undoubtedly plays a central role in the dialogue between the individual will and the needs and norms of the community.
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One Comment
That’s really cool how you drew parallels to Wikipedia and Yelp.
Sometimes I feel like we need someone like the extremely knowledgeable person on Wikipedia who goes through articles adding information and correcting falsities. Because we’re all students, I feel like sometime through our discussions we stumble on some knot that we can’t seem to unravel. Maybe we can work on getting religious scholars to advise us when we need help?
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