Whenever I come across new prognostications about how the Internet, cyberspace, or virtual reality will bring about either a new age of prosperity, or a millennium of evil and despair, I enjoy reaching for a favorite book, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation (Pantheon, 1984).
A joint project of The Nation magazine and the Institute of Expertology, this book has a chapter on Homo Faber (Man the toolmaker) and the unstoppable march of technology, including such gems as these:
- “I think there is a world market for about five computers,” a remark made in 1943, attributed to Thomas J. Watson, the late chairman of ibm.
- “[A] few decades hence, energy may be free—just like the unmetered air,” John von Neumann, the Fermi Award-winning mathematician and cofounder of game theory, in 1956.
- “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home,” Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977.
The technoprophecies of the 1990s, often either deeply pessimistic or blithely utopian, view the development of cyberspace as if it were a newly discovered continent, full of delights to be exploited and dangers to be sidestepped.
In much the same way as explorers of an earlier era did, the cybernauts of this new world, courtesy of more than 120 million computers linked worldwide, are bringing all the great religions of the world along with them. Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and thousands of other religious groups have staked out territory in cyberspace. For the uninitiated Christian, the Christian Cyberspace Companion, by Jason Baker, furnishes an excellent introduction to the Internet and provides a valuable appendix of key religion resources.
Now that religion and the cyberfaithful are online, what do they aim to accomplish? How is cyberspace changing the rules and practice of religion? What are the tradeoffs?
Answering such questions is dependent on understanding as best we can how the Internet is altering our environment for better and worse. The experts and explorers may often be wrong in their predictions—not only because the pace of technological development is so rapid, but also because it is a remarkably human process, subject to unpredictable twists and turns.
INTERNET AND RELIGION
An insightful commentary on cyber-pathologies, Virtual Gods, edited by Tal Brooke, in part advances a critique of the Internet through citing ideas from scholar and social critic Jacques Ellul: that technological progress “has its price,” that it raises more and greater problems than it solves, that technology’s benefits are inseparable from its destructive effects, and that every major technological innovation leads to many unforeseen consequences.
While we need these cautions against an uncritical faith in “progress,” there is a difference between healthy skepticism and a demonizing of technology. A reader of Virtual Gods may be left with the impression that the use of technology is invariably a Faustian bargain, that it inevitably dehumanizes us and ultimately costs us our souls.
When technology functions as a religion, as savior and liberator we begin to project divine attributes onto it
Certainly no human contraption, high-tech, low-tech, or no-tech, should ever be called neutral or impartial. In this decade, the Internet has repositioned itself at least three times, going from a strategic defense program, to the university, and finally to the open commercial marketplace on a worldwide scale. If you look in detail at how the Internet has developed, its technology has progressed to give its users a competitive advantage. Commercial junk e-mail, for example, was a nonexistent problem two years ago. Today it has become a huge issue for anyone with an e-mail address. It’s a new way of selling goods and services, giving vendors a leg up on their competition.
Among religions, a competitive advantage is pursued vigorously—if not for converts, then for public opinion and recognition. Although technophiles who embrace the Internet proclaim how it makes us better, I most often observe how little cyberspace has altered our behavior or core identities in any fundamental way. Jeff Zaleski’s The Soul of Cyberspace chronicles how Sufi mystics, Roman Catholics, Lubavitchers, and other religious groups function online. They use the World Wide Web and other Internet areas to display an electronic self-portrait.
But what durable value is there in being online? Internet technology accelerates the rate of cultural change, intensifies new opportunities, and leverages one’s grasp to global proportions. Computer technology allows us to do things faster, cheaper, and with greater precision. But for some, that is not enough. Author Zaleski’s persistent question on whether prana, the Hindu term for life force, is transmittable via computers suggests that the supreme achievement for technology would be a computer achieving humanlike consciousness.
INTERNET AS RELIGION
A handful of leading postmodernists, New Agers, cyber-utopians, and others aspire to a future in which the Internet would function as a godlike force: omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.
While most of us consider computers as nifty tools to help us do our jobs better, this emerging movement has goals that seem straight out of a Star Trek episode:
- Developing computer systems to accept an upload of a dying individual’s intelligence and personality.
- Creating a worldwide-linked computer system that would operate as a global mind.
- Reproducing computer-generated virtual realities that would operate with the same legitimacy as everyday reality.
If you set aside the scientific improbability of achieving such goals, these aspirations reveal a deeply spiritual agenda. When technology functions as a religion, as savior and liberator, we begin to project divine attributes onto it. We long for a way to take the sting out of death, for a connection to something larger and wiser than ourselves, and for a way to control and change our environments at will.
These desires expose the great risk of overreliance on technological solutions to the exclusion of other means. The force and power of technological progress has a multiplying, accumulating effect to the point where it may become the dominant influence on our lives. And within such dominance lies its natural limitations. Less than 10 years after the beginning of widespread availablity of Internet access, there are books on infoglut, cyberaddictions, and other maladjustments.
In The Soul in Cyberspace, Douglas Groothuis, assistant professor of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary, probes the extremist fringe of cyberideology from an evangelical perspective. A wild assortment of radical libertarians, antihumanist philosophers, and others with diverse and often contradictory agendas have seen in this new technology the fulfillment of their dreams. The Internet, true to its malleable character, becomes putty in their ideological hands. You would be hard-pressed to find a more alarming yet responsible survey of the ‘Net’s dark side than Groothuis’s book.
There is ample reason for these concerns. The impact of pornography, for example, has been dramatically increased by the Internet. A recent newspaper article about the World Wide Web was headlined “News and Nudes.” It detailed how the Wall Street Journal and Playboy magazine are among the few organizations well positioned to make a profit on the Web.
Nevertheless, it is a mistake to define the Internet solely by its excesses or perversions, as some Christians—and evangelicals in particular—seem to be in danger of doing. If you look at how people routinely interact with cyberspace technology, the Internet is essentially a communications medium. It is a means, not an end; a vehicle, not a destination. As a literary metaphor, cyberspace’s power comes from its ability to reshape our imaginations. Most of the worries about neognostics and postmodernists in cyberspace are overstated. The Internet is a technology of ideological convenience and is so plastic in its application that it mirrors more than remolds its users.
The Soul of Cyberspaceby Jeff Zaleski HarperSanFrancisco 284 pp.; $22
Christian Cyberspace Companion: A Guide to the Internet and Christian Online Resourcesby Jason D. Baker Baker Book House 2nd ed., 250 pp.; $15.99, paper
Virtual GodsEdited by Tal Brooke Harvest House 221 pp.; $10.99, paper
The Soul in CyberspaceBy Douglas Groothuis Baker Book House 192 pp.; $9.99, paper
That is precisely the point made by Columbia University’s Jaron Lanier, the computer pioneer who developed the virtual reality interface glove. He explains, in an interview in The Soul of Cyberspace:
The Internet is a giant mirror being held up to mankind that we’ve never had before. It reflects all of our flaws and our embarrassments as well as our best qualities. It’s an honest mirror. So there’s a lot of dreadful stuff, but it’s really us. It’s really who we are.
WHAT HAVE-NOTS HAVE
I live and work in suburban Chicago. For my work as a journalist, I have four e-mail addresses, a Web site at my disposal, telephone, voice mail, fax, two computers on my desk, and two at home. Many of my coworkers are in a similar technology-rich environment.
I have an Anglican missionary friend who, until the recent military coup, was stationed in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. She had nothing except a telephone and an electronic typewriter—and not always the electricity to use them. Her situation is not uncommon for the 740 million people living on the African continent, probably the least-wired region on the planet.
One of the most troublesome aspects of the Internet is how poorly its benefits are distributed. By and large, well-educated, English-speaking men in developed countries dominate cyberspace technology. Although an e-mail address and Internet service provider does bring the world to your desktop, there are billions of people in Asia, Africa, and other parts of the developing world who have no hope of gaining significant access to the Internet in the foreseeable future.
Traditionally, religious people would see this lack of access as an issue of economic and social justice. There are trickle-down ministry efforts that pass along computers and software to the disadvantaged. The predominant paradigm for viewing people who do not have technology at their fingertips is that they are poor, and we, the cybertech generation, are rich. Granted, there is an objective scale of rich and poor, which covers the spectrum from absolute poverty (no food, shelter, or clothing) to the fabulously wealthy. But there are other measures.
What I have discovered in visits to rural African villages in Uganda is that the technologically deprived, the have-nots of the modern era, have a quality and quantity of human interaction that we technophiles have lost. (Please keep in mind that I am referring almost exclusively to communications technology like the Internet, not medical or agricultural technology.)
Our high-tech society increasingly interposes a machine interface between people. Parents with children in daycare in some American cities now even have the option of using Internet video to monitor their children and caregivers. Such interaction could hardly be satisfying, but parents are choosing to use the Internet in this way when they lack any ready alternative.
FAITH FORMATION AND CYBERCULTURE
Over the next several years, the growth rate of cyberspace will slow somewhat, but the Internet will continue to expand. It will become more commercial, more like television, and easier to use. The nuisance of junk e-mail, the proliferation of cyberporn, threats to personal privacy: all these will increase as well, not to mention as-yet unanticipated side effects. The ‘Net is a work in progress. Author Jason Baker poses the challenge to Christians: “If we retreat from our call to be salt and light, then the foreseeable future of cyberspace could be much like that of television.”
So is it the fate of the Internet to become the cyberwasteland of the twenty-first century? Christians who aim at penetrating the Internet and striving for dominance are just as capable of laying waste to cyberspace as any predatory technocapitalist. Many evangelicals are eager to use technology to speed up the process of spiritual formation, extend the outreach of evangelistic efforts, and enhance our means of ministry to needy people. But these efforts must not interfere with the biblical reality that God mediates his relationship with us through the living Christ and his Holy Spirit, and not a cathode-ray tube, Qwerty keyboard, and a Pentium II processor.
Timothy C. Morgan is associate editor of Christianity Today magazine and head of CT’s news department.
Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
