Hello.
Welcome to our presentation of Putting the Waz on Social Media, Infrastructuring Online
Islamic Counterpublic through Digital Sermons in Bangladesh.
My name is Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat.
This work is a collaboration with Hasan Mahmud Prottoy and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed.
The Waz is a kind islamic sermon event popular among many Bangladeshi muslims.
It is usually an outdoor event, where Islamic preachers deliver their speeches.
Thousands of Muslims join this night long-event.
As digital devices have become widely available and internet infrastructure has improved in
Bangladesh, many grassroots content creators have established businesses based on the sermon
videos.
The content creators create the videos and upload them on social media and video sharing
platforms in a large scale.
A huge number of viewership of these videos brings revenues for content creators.
On the other hand, the videos are becoming popular among Bangladeshi Muslims.
As many people follow the Islamic preachers in Bangladesh, the influence of the preachers
are creating political, moral, legal, and social influences.
The HCI literature often reports the infrastructure and politics of grassroots movements and their
implications for computing technologies.
However, studies examining the grassroots politics in HCI are primarily focused on Western
secular political changes and cannot capture various forms of religious and social movements
around the world.
Outside of the Western secular world, religious communities in the Global South often organize
movements at the grassroots level.
Such religious movements are not organized for political or economic confrontations;
rather, many of them are organized for moral imperatives and social reforms.
We inform such an organically grown religious moral and political grassroots movement which
is organized through the creation and dissemination of online sermon videos.
Next, we turn our attention to social sciences, design, and media studies literature to understand
the interplay among pervasive media sharing, religion, morality, and politics.
We do so by explaining the notion of the public, and the creation of a public formed through
the dissemination and consumption of sermon videos.
The current notion of public in HCI heavily draws from John Dewey.
This notion marginalize the religious public from the modern democratic public sphere.
As a result, HCI has a dearth of knowledge about religious public and their politics.
We fill this gap by discussing the formation of a religious public and their implication
for HCI.
Altogether, we make three research contribution to HCI:
First, We present five aspects of faith-based infrastructuring: faith; informal learning;
collaboration and negotiation; creativity, arts, and skills; and maintenance, fixing,
and care.
Second, Building on the anthropology of sensual reason, we contribute to a better understanding
of the interaction of HCI and politics.
We show how Islamic sermon media engages Muslims in online and offline conversations and creates
a political and moral counterpublic.
We further discuss the politics of social media platforms unfolded through Islamic media
sharing practices.
Third, We contributes to HCI, HCI4D, and international development by explaining how Islamic media
sharing increases the adoption of computing technologies and digital literacy among Islamic
faith-based communities to make HCI more inclusive of religious communities.
Further, we note a transition of the Global South population from ‘passive users’
to ‘producers’ of digital content and draw HCI’s attention to this emerging trend.
We conducted this study in Dhaka and Tongi.
Two Bangladeshi cities.
The study started in October 2019 and ended in June 2020.
We did Semi-structured interviews, observation, contextual inquiries, co-creation of sermon
videos, photography, and videography.
I will start the finding by briefly talking about the ecology of creating and sharing
sermon videos.
The process of creating the videos starts from a collaboration among content creators,
sermon organizers, and the preachers.
The content creators videotape the sermons and edit the videos to upload to YouTube,
Facebook, and other social media outlets.
There is also a parallel market offline to sell the videos from video-selling carts.
People watch the videos either online or load their microSD cards from video selling shops
in a regular interval.
We have found that the consumptions of the sermon videos are higher than other forms
of entertainment media because of people’s religious devotion, the easy accessibility
of the sermon videos, and the availability of the videos in Bengali language.
As there is a huge demand of sermon videos, the Islamic content creators have created
a faith-based infrastructure to efficiently make and share the videos.
Faith, faith-based networks, and divine motivations are the primary factors that create and sustain
the digital sermon media ecology.
The Islamic media firms and amateur content creators go through a series of learning processes
related to apprenticeship, mimicking, trial and error, and other forms of experiential
learning.
The infrastructure involves a diverse set of collaboration, negotiation, prioritization,
and decision-making processes among the preachers, organizing committee members, media firms,
and amateur content creators.
The content creators learn various creative arts and skills in recording, preparing, and
uploading sermon videos on appropriate platforms.
Some high-level “fixing” and maintenance activities are very essential features if
this faith-based infrastructure.
Now, how does this study contribute to the CHI community.
First, Our study makes a contribution to the intersection of HCI and infrastructuring by
explicating the process of creating the faith-based infrastructure for digital content creation.
In HCI, faith has not yet been strongly considered as an important factor in infrastructuring.
We demonstrate that faith and its associated practices are vital components of the sort
of infrastructure we present in this paper.
We argue that taking faith seriously will equip HCI researchers with tools and techniques
to effectively engage with the faith-based communities online.
Second, we show how a faith-based infrastructure imposes some unique challenges at the policy
level for global technology platforms, such as YouTube.
Global technology platforms often design “universal” policies.
Our study shows that universal platform politics pose unique challenges and barriers for faith-based
infrastructuring.
The faith-based infrastructure creates a new avenue for HCI to weigh the universal platform
politics and revisit them to include practices related to local norms which involve faith-based
values.
Third, we discuss how people at the grassroots create online religious public through faith-based
infrastructuring.
The findings from our ethnography and the insights drawn from the anthropology of sensual
reason [56] show how the grassroots Islamic content creators are facilitating sermon videos
to create an “imagined community”.
The online sermons are inspiring small talks, discussion, and debate about quotidian lifestyles,
habits, thoughts, peace, hope, or public policies–in short, whatever a citizen in a modern “public”
sphere possibly discusses.
Such interactions often result in constituting alternative community norms, techniques, and
standards leading to creating the Islamic counterpublic.
Finally, we demonstrate how Islamic digital media embodies a “pious disposition” and
increases the adoption of computing technologies and digital literacy in a historically hard-to-reach
faith-based community in the Global South.
This inform HCI4D community about a shift of religious community from technology aversion
to adoption.
We further argue that Global South population’s are transitioning from the ‘passive user’
to the producer of digital media.
Such a trend indicates the Global South population’s progress as consumers of digital technologies.
However, we also report a lack of resources for them to fully engage in digital content
creation.
We hope that the future work in HCI4D and ICTD will address the challenges of digital
content creation by marginalized communities in Global South.
Thank you for watching the video.
Please read more about this research from the link provided here.
Thank you.