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The face we see in the digital mirror: how technology is changing religion
National Catholic Reporter, Feb 11, 2005 by Richard Thieme
I am a middle-age man who grew to maturity in a world of text, immersed in a typographic sea. I read endlessly and began writing stories as a teen.
When I tried to fred a market for those stories, I turned to a standard reference, Writer's Market, to locate magazines. Now, that sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it's not. That book, the Writer's Market, was itself a textual artifact that clearly defined my horizons,of possibility. I internalized the information in it--markets in North America, markets to which I could send stories typed on paper by mail--as the limits of my vision.
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Flash forward to the early '90s, when I wrote an article for Wired Magazine about the impact of the Internet. They printed 500 words and gave back 4,500. I sat in front of my word processor, hooked up to a telephone modem, wondering where I could send an article using those extra words.
Then the light bulb went on. Duh. I could use the Internet to fred markets for my article about the Internet.
I surfed the nascent Web and located magazines in South Africa, England and Australia. I offered articles by e-mail and within a week had contracts and had become a writer with a global presence.
Now, this is the point: That light bulb would never have gone on, I would never have discovered possibilities that shattered my old vision and disclosed those new horizons, had I not engaged with the technology and allowed it to disclose those possibilities. The technology itself over time restructured my beliefs.
That sounds obvious now, 10 years later, but then it was revolutionary. The breakthrough came when I realized that I was using the new technology like the old technology, as if a word processor were a typewriter, as if new wine could be squeezed into old wineskins. After I had engaged with the medium for a time, the information implicit in the transaction itself broke through to my conscious mind and I had an epiphany.
That's what technologies are doing, too, to our notions of spirituality, our religious and spiritual practices and the organizational structures of our religions.
When we find ourselves blessed or cursed to live in a period of a genuine transformation--not just a time of accelerated change, but a time of elemental restructuring--it is hard to speak about the implications of that restructuring for our most cherished religious traditions, Symbols and beliefs because they feel like skin on the bone and changes in them feel like a threat to our very being rather than an evolutionary necessity.
But transformations will happen, and afterward, when the skin is gone but the bone stays, when our essential selves and spiritual commitments stay, only then will we see that God is still God and cannot be equated to the image of God or idea about God to which we became so inordinately attached.
In this brief exploration of the impact of information and communication technologies on religious life, I hope to distinguish skin and bone.
The impact of these transforming technologies on our identities cannot be overstated. In turn, our identifies--who we think we are when we don't even think about it--determine what we believe we are capable of being and doing. Identity is destiny, and our technologies, by defining those identities, frame the parameters of our lives, disclose our horizons.
How does this, happen? The way Ernest Hemingway said we go bankrupt --gradually, then suddenly. We never see what's obvious until it is unavoidable. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto and told the world where to find it, astronomers searched through old photographic plates to look for the coordinates of Pluto's orbit. Sure enough, there the planet was and there it always had been, right in front of their eyes. But no one saw it because they didn't know where to look.
The foundations of our religious traditions are undergoing a profound transformation, but we are still using word processors as if they are typewriters.
New era in communication
This is the fourth great era of the Technology of the Word, as theologian Jesuit Fr. Walter Ong calls it. The first was the era of speech and the co-evolution of tongue, larynx, pharynx, and brain, which enabled us to create that first "virtual space," something like the one we are inhabiting as I write and you read these words. The creation of linguistic symbols, and the creation of a meaningful universe from those symbols, in which we then live as if it is real, made us humans.
Speaking humans lived in oral cultures for thousands of years, populating a vast unknown prehistory that existed before writing. When writing emerged, everything from oral cultures either disappeared or found itself translated into written form.
We know that religious images, artifacts and rituals were part of oral cultures, but we only know those images and words that were translated into written symbols. That may sound obvious, but the implications are important. It is not coincidental that the persons associated with the world's major religions as we currently define them--Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Abraham, Moses, Muhammad and all the others--emerged into human consciousness through the written word, which transformed our ancestors, and the internalized images of self and God formed as they engaged with written text. In every instance, a flesh-and-blood human being was transformed through writing into a "textual being," a being with whom or which we engage in and through the text. Theology implicitly became hermeneutics, the study of how texts mean, because interaction with written texts forms an image distinctive to the technology that created the text.
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