New publication – Finding Congregations through Online Searches: Possibilities and Perils

Posted on October 17, 2025 by legallysociable

Review of Religious Research just published online a research note I wrote titled “Finding Congregations through Online Searches: Possibilities and Perils.” This comes out of research I have been conducting the last few years looking for religious congregations in the suburbs. With all the congregations with online presences, whether on social media or on websites or in online directories, what can researchers learn? Here is the abstract for the article:

Many religious congregations are active online and people seek out congregations online but existing research is less clear about whether all congregations within a geographic area are discoverable through online searches and what information about congregations is available online. Searching for congregations in a large suburban county on five online platforms – three directories (YellowPages.com, Yelp.com, ChurchFinder.com) and two social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram) – revealed over 700 congregations. The counts showed similarities and differences for certain religious groups compared to the 2020 U.S. Religion Census. It is difficult to have certainty regarding obtaining a complete population of congregations in this county given the ambiguity of some online information and the possible number of congregations not online. Of congregations found online, the different platforms enable researchers to examine locations, buildings, images, posts, links, activities, and interactions with online actors. These findings point to a need for more online searching for congregations in order to study hundreds of congregations at a time, compare online search results to other methods for finding congregations, and contribute to research on congregational activity, online interactions, and closures.

I have analyzed the online presence of congregations in several works as it enables researchers to look across a large number of cases. And it provides needed insights into what congregations are doing online and offline as the worlds are more overlapping than some might imagine. Can looking at congregations online find all the congregations or tell a researcher everything about congregational activity? No, but it offers opportunities that might be hard to match with other methods and insights into the influential online realm.

How much social information can we handle?

Posted on September 15, 2025 by legallysociable

Humans are social. People need connections to others. This is how they learn, grow, and accomplish things both as individuals and groups. We understand ourselves in part by knowing about people and the world around us. Is there a limit to how much social activity and information people can take in and still live a good life?

Much of the debate over social media seems to focus on either the content of the information or the time spent with it that could be better used elsewhere. Both are concerns but they only hint at this question: can we handle all the information and social interactions?

For much of human history, people lived in relatively small communities. They lived in close proximity to family, often extended family and people of similar people groups. Traditions were important and technological progress was slower. There are examples in history of large urban centers but these are rare; small villages and towns were the more common social space.

The modern era and all that came with it – rationalism, industrialism, growing populations, urbanization, liberal democracies, pushing back against tradition, new technologies – expanded the number of social connections people could have. Big cities – 1 million-plus people – became common. People had more mobility. Access to other people and information expanded rapidly.

The Internet and social media is layered on top of these processes already underway and ongoing. Through these technologies, humans can connect with many more people and can access much more information. Something happens far away and we can know about it in minutes or seconds. Rather than relying on proximity for many of our social connections, we can interact with people and groups all over the place.

Perhaps humans can figure out how to deal with this all. How many would say they would want to go back to times where people primarily relied on people around them for relationships and information? People might figure out ways to shift their focus to all the options in front of them or better compartmentalize the big picture options and the world immediately around them. Or maybe not. We have options now that most humans never had – we can find out a lot and we can interact with or find out about almost anyone we would like – and we will see how we come to grips with them.

Prominent crosses Christian congregations feature outside, inside, and online

Posted on April 21, 2025 by legallysociable

Working on some recent research involving religious buildings and also celebrating Easter yesterday, I was reminded of how many Christian churches feature crosses. Here are several local examples of church exteriors:

Not all churches have crosses on the outside. Some congregations want to avoid looking like a church and this could include eschewing traditional features like crosses or steeples. But many do feature crosses on the sides of buildings, on roofs, and on signs.

Similarly, if one were to walk into Christian churches, crosses are often present. They may be behind an altar or hanging on a side wall or incorporated in art or a bulletin.

And in looking for religious congregations online, I found many also feature crosses in the images they use. For example, in Facebook profile pictures and cover images, many Christian congregations feature a cross somewhere. In searching for congregations, a cross is a very common image one will find on social media and websites.

For these congregations that feature crosses, they likely see it as part of their theological foundations and part of their message of who they are. Christians are people of the cross and they share that image with the world. Whether one finds a congregation in a storefront, a school, an older religious building, or an online space, they are likely to find a cross somewhere and often prominently displayed.

McMansions and McVulnerabilities

Posted on February 10, 2025 by legallysociable

The Mc- prefix continues to live on in analysis of American life. As a recent example, here is a description of “McVulnerability” found in social media videos of crying and sadness:

The weepy confessions are, ostensibly, gestures toward intimacy. They’re meant to inspire empathy, to reassure viewers that influencers are just like them. But in fact, they’re exercises in what I’ve come to call “McVulnerability,” a synthetic version of vulnerability akin to fast food: mass-produced, easily accessible, sometimes tasty, but lacking in sustenance. True vulnerability can foster emotional closeness. McVulnerability offers only an illusion of it. And just as choosing fast food in favor of more nutritious options can, over time, result in harmful outcomes, consuming “fast vulnerability” instead of engaging in bona fide human interaction can send people down an emotionally unhealthy path…

McVulnerability is perhaps an inevitable outcome of what the sociologist Eva Illouz identifies as a modern-day landscape of “emotional capitalism.” “Never has the private self been so publicly performed and harnessed to the discourses and values of the economic and political spheres,” Illouz writes in her book Cold Intimacies. Emotional capitalism has “realigned emotional cultures, making the economic self emotional and emotions more closely harnessed to instrumental action.” That is, not only does emotionality sell goods, but emotions themselves have also become commodities…

McVulnerability, from whichever angle you look at it, is the opposite of generous. It doesn’t require risk. It may pretend to give, but ultimately, it takes. And it leaves most of its consumers hungry for what they’re craving: human connection—the real thing.

The “Mc-” prefix makes sense given the popularity of McDonald’s. The way the term is deployed above seems similar to how the term McMansion has been used for several decades. McVulnerability is a pale substitute for true vulnerability. It is vulnerability in a popular and commodified form.

But can the term stick? It may depend on the popularity of such viral videos. Do they have staying power or will they be gone to be replaced by other trending videos? Will this pattern last for years? Or there might be other terms that describe these videos. Or the critique may not stick – what if most watchers see the emotional expressions as real and valuable? If such expressions become the new normal, perhaps McVulnerability is here to stay.

We’ll have to wait and see. McDonald’s will go on and plenty of other mass produced products and experiences will come along. Which ones will live on in “Mc-” infamy?

“Symbolic capitalists” driving social media activity

Posted on December 24, 2024 by legallysociable

In his analysis of “symbolic capitalists” in We’ve Never Been Woke, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi summarizes research on who uses social media:

All said, it is a relatively small segment of the population that is “very online” with respect to social media, or that regularly consumes jouranalistic media in virtually any format (TV, online, print, podcasts) – let alone engaging with research by think tanks, nonprofits, activists, or academics. Mostly, it’s people like us. Virtually the entire political and cultural melodrama carried out in academia, policymaking spaces, media outlets, and social networking sites it carried out among symbolic capitalists. The views and priorities of most others are simply unrepresented in these spaces. And for their part, most of those who are not symbolic capitalists are not particularly interested in the highly idiosyncratic struggles we invest so much of ourselves into. (195)

This seems consistent with earlier reports I’ve seen. Social media activity is driven by a small set of users who are not representative of the American population at large.

This could be helpful to keep in mind when wondering if social media is fragmented or how widespread a trend is or whether algorithms could be driving people to different corners of the Internet. These features might be true AND social media as a whole might be driven by a small set of people who share particular positions and practices.

(Read more about the definition of symbolic capitalists here.)

Some difficulties in directly studying the effects of social media use on mental health

Posted on October 16, 2024 by legallysociable

As more actors express concerns about how social media use affecting the mental health of “children and teens,” this article suggests it can be hard to directly measure this link:

It doesn’t help that mental health is influenced by many factors, and no single treatment works for every person. “It’s not as straightforward as: What is the right antibiotic for that ear infection?” said Megan Moreno, a scientist and pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and co-director of the Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health at the American Academy of Pediatrics…

Among the reasons that make it difficult to isolate the role of social media in kids’ mental health is that the relationship between mental health and tech use is a two-way street, the panel from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said. A person’s mental state might influence how he or she uses the platform, which in turn affects his or her state of mind.

Randomized, controlled studies on whether social media caused the mental-health crisis are impractical because exposure to social media is now everywhere, researchers say. In addition, platforms are constantly changing their features, hobbling efforts to run long-term studies, they say.

A decade ago, Munmun De Choudhury, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, was part of a team that showed that groups promoting disordered eating were skirting Instagram’s moderation efforts. De Choudhury says that such studies probably would be impossible today because social-media companies no longer allow access to public data, or charge hefty fees for it…

Research into the roots of distress in young people has found that other factors—bullying, or lack of family support—have stronger associations with mental-health outcomes, compared with social-media use.

These are different issues. This includes having access to data from platforms as well as data over time. Additionally, it takes work to separate out different influences on mental health. Randomized controlled trials that could help with this are difficult to put together in this situation. Other factors are shown to influence mental health.

Some think there is enough data to make the argument about social media use influencing mental health. For example, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts together evidence in his latest book The Anxious Generation. His approach is one that social scientists can take: there seem to be consistent patterns over time and other factors do not seem to account as well for the outcomes observed. And if there is a growing consensus across studies and scholars, this is another way for scientific findings to advance.

This is an ongoing situation as policy efforts and research efforts follow sometimes intertwining paths. If a state restricts social media use for teenagers and then mental health issues drop, would this count as evidence for social media causing mental health distress?

Add political ads to political yard signs in a third season

Posted on October 10, 2024 by legallysociable

On Monday, I proposed adding political yard sign season to the Chicago seasons of winter and construction. I want to amend that third season: include political ads with political yard signs.

Photo by Home Decor Interiors on Pexels.com

Political ads are everywhere this time of year and they are hard to avoid:

-During all TV broadcasts. Whether watching football games or news broadcasts or sitcoms, candidates are all over the screen.06

-Internet and social media ads. I do not see many of these due to using adblockers but the ads are over the place.

-Mailings as candidates flood mailboxes with appeals and glossy photos and policy positions.

-Texts asking you to vote for candidates or support a candidate. How many of these numbers do we need to block?

-On the radio. Perhaps not as pervasive as TV but still there.

And I do not even live in a battleground state where I would guess there are even more ads.

The political ads must work to some degree as millions are spent on them. Who exactly is convinced by them? Do they primarily rile up a base who then votes in larger numbers? At the same time, I remember hearing a talk by a sociologist who interviewed campaign managers who reported that social media ads are preferable because it is easier to measure who responds or engages compares to mass media ads.

Commercials are part of the American way of life. Anywhere you turn, you see brands, logos, and appeals for particular products. Given that landscape where we see thousands of ads, why not throw in politicians and parties and issues as just another brand or product to sell?

Like the political yard signs, the ads will disappear after Election Day. They will be back for the next races as different actors try to position their candidates in front of the public in a truly American way.

Argument: you cannot understand the attachment to smartphones and social media today without accounting for the decline in community life starting in the 1960s

Posted on June 14, 2024 by legallysociable

Jonathan Haidt, author of the recent book The Anxious Generation, argued the recent development of a phone-based childhood was preceded by a decline in childhood play. He now wants to add to this argument: both of these followed a decline in local community.

When I was writing The Anxious Generation, I thought of it as a tragedy in two acts: In Act I, we took away the play-based childhood (1990-2010), and in Act II, we gave kids the phone-based childhood (2010-2015). Teen mental health plunged in the middle of Act II.

But as Zach and I were finishing up the revisions of the book in the fall of 2023, and Zach was running additional analyses and making additional graphs, we began to realize that there was a third act, which predated Act I and caused it: the decline of local community, trust, and social capital. That’s the long process charted in Robert Putnam’s 2000 masterpiece Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and updated in his more recent book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.

This is an argument about historical change and processes emerging from existing conditions. Put in other words, the United States had close-knit local communities and many local organizations which then declined which led parents and communities to pull back on children playing which created a vacuum into which smartphones and social media stepped into.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam describes multiple factors at work in the decline of community and local organizations. This includes the expansion of suburbs and the spread of television. And in The Upswing, Putnam argues civic participation and community life of the mid-twentieth century arose from lower levels earlier in the twentieth century.

All this suggests social capital and community life can rise and fall over longer periods with numerous social forces at work. What is going on now may not be what is happening in 20 years or 50 years and these future permutations may not look like the past. With smartphones, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and all the other social conditions of today, what kind of community life might emerge?

Zillow Gone Wild is popular but how can one make money from it?

Posted on May 2, 2024 by legallysociable

Social media users like to see unusual residences on the account Zillow Gone Wild:

Since he started the account in December 2020, it has exploded into a social media phenomenon, amassing more than 4 million followers across the major social media platforms and spinning off an HGTV show that debuts next month with Mezrahi as executive producer. Throughout it all, Mezrahi’s recipe has remained mostly unchanged: Find the zaniest homes on the market – castle-themed mansions with full drawbridges, for example – then blast them out to the internet with a bit of pithy commentary, and watch the clicks, likes and shares pile up. The simplicity of the premise is part of the brilliance; it’s the result of the decade-plus that Mezrahi spent charting the internet’s fascinations as social media director for BuzzFeed.

Does all this interest in houses translate into money?

None of this, however, was enough to save Mezrahi at BuzzFeed. The now-struggling company laid him off last spring. He had survived previous cuts, “but eventually you don’t last, especially as a strategist kind of person,” Mezrahi says. Already, he’d been mulling the prospect of leaving the full-time gig to focus entirely on his personal projects. BuzzFeed simply made the choice for him…

Still, there is one thing that Mezrahi shares in common with the rest of them: He’s trying to figure out how to make more money off the internet. Aside from the HGTV executive producer credit, most of Zillow Gone Wild’s revenue comes from ads. He did one for “The Bachelor,” posting what looked like a typical listing but for the show’s famed house. PopTarts and Royal Caribbean have also paid him to promote fake listings for a house made of PopTarts, and for the new Icon of the Seas cruise ship.

But the account still brings in “very little” money, he says. He imagines a future where his newsletter has a paid classified section or where he dedicates more time to growing a YouTube audience because that platform can be the most lucrative.

Americans like houses. It helped give rise to suburbia and an decades-long emphasis on homeownership. That they are now popular on social media should not be a surprise.

It will be interesting to see how this goes in the next few years. How big can the social media audience get for this account? Would users be willing to pay for such content or special content? How much content could there be? Will a TV show lead to more opportunities or spin-offs or streaming shows? Can Zillow Gone Wild be its own brand soon with different content and products?

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