#Interfaith: Engaging Religious Diversity Online

Users are guests on these platforms, and we should be aware of what we’re giving up when we give our data to them.

It’s critical to understand how to separate truth from fiction online. We must continually ask how do we ensure that information people are sharing is healthy and true, and adds to our collective benefit as opposed to creating division?

That the stuff we do online isn’t fake or any less real than offline. People think that the internet is less real than IRL, so they don’t take it seriously or hold themselves to the same moral practices that they do in other parts of their lives. Even though people are forming meaningful connections online all the time, they discount them. IRL and URL are different: but one isn’t more real than the other.

The Internet has been taken over by capitalist infrastructure. It was intended to connect people, and that’s been perverted and turned into a tool of financial gain on every level.

We are producers and not consumers, and that there’s a responsibility that comes with that and a set of competencies we need to learn.

Users create the digital worlds they live in. But we also live in spaces online that have been created for us, and people don’t realize how much the choices of the designers of these spaces can begin to shape their worldview. It is called, ‘the myth of interactivity’ we see the internet as this open space of complete freedom, when actually most of the options open to us have already been determined by media designers, and the previous choices we’ve made.

That the internet should be a human right which everyone has access to.  Technology is neutral: people decide how technology moves. Corporations are trying to privatize it even more (net neutrality), and people need to be aware of this threat.