These representative acts of public judgment were meaningful in ways that transcend the unjust system. The world was watching and that was significant.
The virtual dimensions of assembly may yield insights for how we understand more traditional assemblies and the legal protections that we assign to them.
This may sound crazy, but what's the difference between tracking your daily prayer life with an app and doing so with another set of repeatable instructions, such as the Benedictine Rule and its set of daily readings and reminders to ponder God?
What is the proper context for even citing a tweet, let alone understanding the import or effects of 140 characters delivered as part of a longer, partially public, partially private exchange?
If we think of Facebook and Google and the computations in which we are enmeshed merely as information-processing machines, we concede our world to one end of the scale, a world of abstracted big data and all powerful algorithms. We forget that the internet, like any technology, is both a material infrastructure and something we do.