“How Hutterites Work around the Internet” will be Dr. Gerald Mast’s topic in a Bluffton University colloquium on Friday, Oct. 17.

Free and open to the public, the presentation will begin at 4 p.m. in Stutzman Lecture Hall in Bluffton’s Centennial Hall.

Mast, a professor of communication at the university, will describe how Hutterites—a communal, Anabaptist faith group—access, discuss and make rules about Internet use. He will focus on contrasting practices between two factions of one traditional group of Hutterites in North Dakota and Manitoba, Canada. The two factions have adopted different decision-making practices and approaches to maintaining boundaries between the colony and the surrounding society, leading to two strategies for working around the Internet.

Mast’s work is part of a larger project that examines responses to digital communication technologies among “plain” Anabaptist communities.