Heidi A. Campbell (born August 26, 1970) is a professor of communications at Texas A&M University.
[1] In her book When Religion Meets New Media (2010),[5] Campbell developed the Religious-Social Shaping of Technology (RSST) approach to examine religious user communities negotiation processes related to media technologies.
A key premise underlying the RSST is that religious communities typically do not reject new forms of technology outright, rather they undergo a sophisticated negotiation process based on their communal background and beliefs.
This informs their response to the various affordances offered by a given technology and potential impacts they perceive it may have on their community.
The RSST approach employs four layers of investigation within a community: In her study, the RSST approach was used in a variety of case studies such as the Amish response to technology, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish use of the "Kosher" phone, Christian and Baháʼí use of the Internet, and modern Islamic discourses about computers.