The face we see in the digital mirror: how technology is changing religion

In a more mundane way, when the U.S. government wanted to encourage people to fly on airplanes then subsidized by the government for delivering mail, it needed to change the word "aeronaut," which designated the bold, courageous pioneers who were willing to fly. They needed a word into which everyone could project his or her identity and came up with "passenger," a word we now use unselfconsciously to refer to an activity we take for granted. In the same way, astronauts going into space will be replaced by space tourists and travelers, and Christians, Jews, Buddhists and all the others will find new names for the new spiritual modalities and religious structures we are generating in networks and electronic webs.

The digital era

Let's call them DPs (digital people, as opposed to print-text people). DPs will interact less and less frequently with images of print-text gods (that is, worship) and more and more often with images of gods-in-pixels in a world in which information is dynamic and distributed, gathered, integrated and recreated on the fly. As digital symbols, icons and glyphs replace printed images, the meaning of processes like "redemption" and "salvation," now locked into nouns that imply a static state, will be transformed, too. Process theology will inevitably gain momentum because it will describe a cosmic structure congruent with our daily experience of this ceaseless flow. We recreate ourselves in and through the forms and structures of our technologies; the digital world is interactive, modular and fluid, so inevitably our lives and how we think of ourselves are becoming interactive, modular and fluid, too.

Think of the common spiritual practice of "journaling," for example. Journaling began when people like James Boswell participated in the discovery and creation of a different kind of sensibility and self by using pen and paper to bring it into being. Today, bloggers engage in a web of self-discovery that older generations dismiss as shallow, but the collective self they are co-creating is in fact appropriate to the technology. When William Harvey described the circulation of blood, it is a historical fact that no physician over 40 ever accepted his theory. In religious life, too, new revelations are accepted one funeral at a time, but along a much longer timeline. Generations must pass away before the new sun can rise and shine.

In more mundane aspects of our lives, however, this impact cannot be avoided. Aspects of our lives that used to be unthinkably accepted as fixed by tradition, for example, have become modules in a self-generated persona or trajectory for which we are increasingly required to accept responsibility. Teaching children to learn how to learn is more important than teaching children stuff. Teaching children how to assemble themselves in an ongoing way is more important than teaching them how to live in a fixed and rigid way in a context that refuses to remain stable and thereby undermines that very fixity.