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Religion, culture and society in the 'information age'
Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2004 by Philip A. Mellor
Over the last twenty years or so, the development of the "cultural turn" within sociological theory has sought to challenge earlier conceptions of culture as a readily circumscribed, derivative phenomenon of secondary importance in relation to the power of economics or social structure (Featherstone 1992). Sociologists of religion have not been slow to recognize the potential benefits of this development, which, amongst other things, raises questions about the reductive assumptions underpinning some conventional secularization theories and opens up fresh avenues for the exploration of the contemporary significance of religious symbols, beliefs and values. The best examples of such studies, however, while illuminating the continuing potency of religion as a cultural resource, have, nonetheless, retained a firm focus on the fact that culture must be examined in relation to society, even if it cannot be reduced into it (Beckford 1989; Hervieu-Leger 2000). In contrast, within some other areas of sociology, this focus has been lost, and "culture" has come to replace "society" as the central object of study. This has had two main consequences: first, it has encouraged the emergence of some highly idealistic forms of theorizing, typically characterized by an epistemological relativism that overrides any serious engagement with human ontology; second, and contrary to the original impulse behind the cultural turn, it has allowed for the development of new forms of reductionism where, freed from any intimate relationship with the complex reality of human society, culture turns out to be determined by something deemed more fundamental, such as technology. These consequences are especially evident in some influential contemporary accounts of the "information age."
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Currently, one of the most prominent forms of the cultural turn in sociological theory is the interest in the pervasiveness and power of cultural changes arising from the development of information technologies, an interest that is closely related to a broader rejection of the conventional sociological focus on society. Indeed, for some writers there is not an information society at all, only a series of mobilities, networks and flows where everything is reconfigured in a global interplay of information. In this respect, these theories call much of the sociological heritage into question: the sociological focus on society developed by classical figures such as Durkheim is deemed to rest upon anachronistic visions of innate human potentialities and characteristics, and upon faulty assumptions about a distinctively social realm of human experience (Urry 2000:11). Instead, sociological study becomes focused upon relationships between culture and technology, and Durkheim's (1995) interest in the social origins of patterns of collective representation is displaced in favor of arguments concerning the power of information technologies to shape human thought and experience. In the words of Castells (1998:1), "A culture of real virtuality, constructed around an increasingly interactive audiovisual universe, has permeated mental representation and communication everywhere, integrating the diversity of cultures in an electronic hypertext." Within these sociological accounts, "making sense of the information" comes to replace the traditional sociological attempt to make sense of society (Lash and Featherstone 2001:16).
These arguments need to be taken seriously by sociologists of religion for two reasons. First of all, they are becoming increasingly influential amongst sociological theorists in general, where they are part of broader attempts to construct a new paradigm for sociology (see Abell and Reyniers 2000). Although very different in nature to new paradigm thinking in the sociology of religion (Warner 1993), both these developments articulate a common desire to reassess conventional sociological assumptions and arguments that appear to be called into question by contemporary social and cultural realities. Second, it is clearly the case that contemporary technological developments can have a significant impact upon social and cultural forms, and upon the ways in which people encounter and experience religious phenomena. Lyon's (2000) sensitive account of the perils and promises faced by those who encounter "Jesus in Disneyland" testifies to the importance of some of the issues raised by information society theorists. Consequently, it is not the intention of this paper to suggest that debates about the information society are unimportant: they raise significant questions about the nature of the contemporary world, and the usefulness of conventional sociological models in seeking to understand it. Rather, the argument of this paper is that the answers offered to these questions by some influential theorists of the information age are highly questionable, and that this manifestation of the cultural turn does not offer a productive development for sociology in general, or for sociologists of religion in particular. Further to this, it is argued that reflection upon the role of religion in relation to society and culture can offer a valuable corrective to some of the more extreme claims of such theories.
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