Abstract
The automation of online social life is an urgent issue for researchers and the public alike. However, one of the most significant uses of such technologies seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the research community: religion. Focusing on Islamic Prayer Apps, which automatically post prayers from its users’ accounts, we show that even one such service is already responsible for millions of tweets daily, constituting a significant portion of Arabic-language Twitter traffic. We argue that the fact that a phenomenon of these proportions has gone unnoticed by researchers reveals an opportunity to broaden the scope of the current research agenda on online automation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
References
Akma, N., and F.H. Abdul Razak. 2013. On the emergence of techno-spiritual: The concepts and current issues. In Computer and mathematical sciences graduates national colloquium 2013 (SISKOM2013).
Al-Halbali, I.J. 2016. The three that follow to the g rave. Birmingham: Dar As-Sunnah Publishers.
Arab Social Media Report. 2014. Twitter in the Arab Region. Available at: http://arabsocialmediareport.com/Twitter/LineChart.aspx. Accessed 12 June 2018.
BBC. 2018. Church of England offers prayers read by Amazon’s Alexa. BBC.com.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44233053. Accessed 27 Mar 2019.
Bell, G. 2006. No more SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, religion and techno-spiritual practices. In UbiComp 2006: Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp 2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ed. P. Dourish and A. Friday, vol. 4206. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/11853565_9.
Bessi, A., and E. Ferrara. 2016. Social bots distort the 2016 US Presidential election online discussion. First Monday.https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21ill.7090.
Bruns, A., T. Highfield, and J. Burgess. 2013. The Arab spring and social media audiences. American Behavioral Scientist 57 (7): 871–898.
Buie, E., and M. Blythe. 2013. Spirituality: There’s an app for that! (But not a lot of research). CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts, April 27–May 2, 2013, Paris, France.
Campbell, H.A. 2010. When religion meets new media. London: Routledge.
Ferrara, E., O. Varol, C.B. Davis, F. Menczer, and A. Flammini. 2016. The rise of social bots. Communications of the ACM 59 (7): 96–104.
Ford, H., E. Dubois, and C. Puschmann. 2016. Keeping Ottawa honest-One tweet at a time? Politicians, journalists, wikipedians and their twitter bots. International Journal of Communication 10: 4891–4914. ISSN 1932-8036.
Gorwa, R., and D. Guilbeault. 2018. Unpacking the social media bot: A typology to guide research and policy. Policy and Internet. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.184.
Lokot, T., and N. Diakopoulos. 2016. News Bots: Automating news and information dissemination on Twitter. Digital Journalism 4 (6): 682–699. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2015.1081822.
Öhman, C., and L. Floridi. 2017. The political economy of death in the age of information: A critical approach to the digital afterlife industry. Minds and Machines. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-017-9445-2.
———. 2018. An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry. Nature Human Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0335-2.
Rothenberg, M. 2017. Why the emoji recycling symbol is taking over Twitter. Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@mroth/why-the-emoji-recycling-symbol-is-taking-over-twitter-65ad4b18b04b. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Sahih Muslim. 1330. Sahih Muslim Vol. 7, Book of Zuhd and Softening of Hearts, Hadith 7064. Retrieved from: http://www.iupui.edu/-msaiupui/042.smt.html. Accessed 27 Mar 2019.
Savage, S., A. Monroy-Hernandez, and T. Hollerer. 2016. Botivist: Calling volunteers to action using online bots. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 813–822. ACM.
Stieglitz, S., F. Brachten, B. Ross, and A.-K. Jung. 2017. Do social bots dream of electric sheep? A categorisation of social media bot accounts. arXiv: 1710.04044 [Cs]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04044.
Twitter. n.d. Inactive account policy. Available at: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/inactive-twitter-accounts. Accessed 27 Mar 2019.
Woodruf, A., S. Augustin, and B. Foucault. 2007. Sabbath day home automation: “It’s like mixing technology and religion”. CHI 2007, April 28–May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA.
Wyche, S.P., K.E. Caine, B. Davison, M. Arteaga, and R.E. Grinter. 2008. Sun dial: Exploring technospiritual design through a mobile Islamic call to prayer application. CHI 2008, April 5–April 10, 2008, Florence, Italy ACM.
Acknowledgements
Our sincere thanks to Bence Kollanyi, for assistance with data collection.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Öhman, C., Gorwa, R., Floridi, L. (2021). Prayer-Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter: A Call for a Wider Research Agenda. In: Floridi, L. (eds) Ethics, Governance, and Policies in Artificial Intelligence. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 144. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81907-1_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81907-1_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-81906-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-81907-1
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)