Social Catholic Internet Bookworms

In today’s day and age, it’s all about networking, isn’t it? You can find the niche where you feel welcomed in practically every corner of the Internet – for cat lovers to philosophical debaters alike, your new Internet community is just a webpage away!

As I continue on this blog and working on papers regarding Catholicism, the technique of social bookmarking was introduced to me. Tags – not the ones used for photos on Facebook – are extremely useful in finding resources (or just things in general) of the same topic. Public tags and communities help people like me who are curious about finding other resources instead of hoping on stumbling across the needed information. 

Thanks to benfischer on Diigo, I was able to find this article on works of mercy, which will be helpful for understanding love and charity, two really important things that the Catholic Church emphasizes. The former in its purest form is our God and the latter is the form of responding the love which we receive. Another article found through shared tags is this one. If you remember my previous post on Mass, this is a really interesting read on the significance of the bread as the Eucharistic host. It turns out this site actually contains a lot of other resources for the Catholic faithful and clergy with information that isn’t too difficult to digest. Furthermore, it’s a blog that’s updated relatively often – how exciting! The most recent is about Ash Wednesday, which was just last week; skimming through, I also found a movie review on Les Miserables from a Catholic’s point of view and lots of posts sharing about saints, which is an area of Catholicism which I personally want to learn about more. This user on Diigo mostly uses this social bookmarking site for articles related to various aspects of Catholicism; I noticed that this person has been reading and highlighting a lot of papal encyclicals, which is exciting, because I’ve been reading some myself lately.

Another user on Diigo, Matthew Strader, also has quite a few tags related to Catholicism, even though they might be mixed in with other tags of different subjects. I found a lot of stuff related to prayer and reflections from the Dominicans through the tags, and prayer is definitely a topic that I’d like to touch upon on my blog in the future. There are a lot bookmarked pages that are updated relatively recently too, which will be resourceful.

I really hope this isn’t too creepy or stalker-ish (I feel like one right now, haha). But this exercise helped me learn how to properly use Internet resources – particularly social bookmarking – to find other users interested in similar topics. I guess the entire purpose of the concept of social bookmarking is to share with others and engage in academic dialogue. One thing that I’ve taken away from this is that it’s encouraging to know I’m not the only one who’s trying to plow through some long encyclicals. Maybe it’s the introverted side of me that finds referencing to other users uncomfortable, but I guess if I feel fine liking Facebook pages and following unknown users on tumblr, then social bookmarking isn’t too much different from that.