fishers, surfers and casters

Increasing access to high-speed Internet connections in the developed world, prolific use of mobile media devices, and the popularity of Web 2.0 applications have changed the nature of being online. Web 2.0 rhetoric has introduced terms and phrases like “produser”, “democratisation of information” and “private/public blur”. I am still fascinated by Murley’s (2005) Protestant wordplay, “the mediahood of all receivers”. Beyond terminological games, this century has begun with the knowledge of two phenomena.

Firstly, we are aware that being online is no longer a discrete step. For many who have enjoyed Internet access for years, and for those who have made it to adulthood without knowing life before the Web, cyberspace need not be a place we need to make time or room for, but is something constantly within reach. As Pang suggests (quoted in Thomas, 2006):

Why is cyberspace coming to an end? Our experience of interacting with digital information is changing. We’re moving to a world in which we (or objects acting on our behalf) are online all the time, everywhere. Designers and computer scientists are also trying hard to create a new generation of devices and interfaces that don’t monopolize out attention, but ride on the edges of our awareness. We’ll no longer have to choose between cyberspace and the world; we’ll constantly access the first while being fully part of the second. Because of this, the idea of cyberspace as separate from the real world will collapse.

Secondly, as blogs and social networking sites present our daily lives to friends, file sharing networks allow us to add our impressions to already published media, and aggregator programs both bring the Web to us, and share our favourite bits of the Web for others to see, the Internet is collecting and shaping an impression of ourselves, and presenting a façade of its users to the world. Thomas (2006) says it plainly:

[...] every time we use eBay or write a Gmail, we make a trade-off between body, technology and nature by allowing our data to become part of that organization’s knowledge base.

In Web 2.0, producer and audience are not just blurred, but are blurred with the text and the medium. I am cyborg, not just because I look at the Internet and see the world, but because the world looks at the Internet and sees me.

I propose that a new “fourth wave” of researching religion online will keep quieter on questions like “Where is the religious Internet and what will it do for me?” and “What can we do online that we can’t do offline and vice versa?” and “What will happen to me when I go online, who will I meet and what will I become?”. Rather, questions will be more like “What is religious about the Internet that I create, gather, rear, mould and cultivate?”. Presumptions existent in previous waves of research may be overcome.

For example, Johns’ (2008) study of religious affiliation and identity among Facebook users showed that Facebook groups with overt religious titles had generally minimal activity. Users who would join these groups would offer little to the group beyond their membership. Johns suggests that in Facebook, users “wave a hello” to religion. What Johns could not study, because he was not “friends with” every Facebook user in the groups he studied, was that it’s likely that any of the groups’ users would have the group advertised (sometimes prominently) on the users profile page. So while the user would not be active within the group, the group’s existence sends a message to all who seek the user in the networking site. The user has used the group (well, the link to the group) to speak for him/her. The link speaks of the user’s religious identity. We see him/her through that group’s page. Yet if the question were posed to these users, “How do you do religion online?”, it is doubtful if they would say they do religion online at all, even though they may claim to be religious in everyday life.

Another example can be found here, referring again to Facebook, and in particular to Facebook user profiles being created posthumously. Also known as tombpages, these profile pages offer a space to remember lost friends. Religious activity may be evident in these sites, in the posts and conversations of visitors, in the publications of prayers and blessings, or tagging images of candles and beads. However if Hoover, Clark and Rainie’s question “Do you go to the Internet for religious purposes?” was asked to these users, the answer may be a resounding negative.

Presumptions about what makes an online practice a religious one, and what makes a religious practice an online one, may be overcome in this fourth wave, as the research tradition experiences a new shift of focus. Lövheim (2008) recognises it well, calling researchers like me to reconsider the “purpose and the social contexts of interaction with religion online”. Firstly, we must ask less about users’ “relation to religious communities on the Internet”, as if online religious communities can tell us all we need to know about online religion. Instead we must consider how religion is a component of the wider “social contexts organized through and in connection to new media”. Secondly, we must ask less about Internet as a place where religion is done in peculiar, unique or traditional ways, and more about how the Internet is one “context for negotiations of the place and value of religion in the wider society and culture”.

How we as a small and eager body of researchers do this is still a matter of determination and imagination. Yet there is a new Internet out there, and with it comes a new challenge and a new opportunity to learn about ourselves.

Brasher (1996) calls her readers to think of cyborgs differently:

Like vassal lord, citizen, and proletariat before it, the cyborg paints humanness in a historical context. It discloses how the organization of contemporary social and political life is working in consort with the reigning means of production to influence the range of humanness possible in our era.

If technology has the power to change the social order, then those for whom ICT is an accessible mode of communication may be a particular class of people, whose language, values and access to resources and even worldviews may differ from those to whom ICT is alien. For Brasher, the cyborg is a metaphor not for how humans reach information online, but for how they interact, both online with each other and offline with cyborgs and non-cyborgs alike.

This new metaphor sits as a useful label for describing what Højsgaard and Warburg identified as the “second wave” of research into religion online. In this wave researchers interested themselves more in the nature of religious practice online. It included rites of passage, ritual and the placement of authority in online Wiccan groups (Helland, 2005), identity formation among adolescents (Lövheim, 2005), the establishment of trust in email groups (Campbell, 2005a). It also included discursive constructions of the technology itself, within religious communities and structures of power (Campbell, 2005b; Dawson, 2005; O’Leary, 2005).

The “third wave”, whose passing was heralded by Højsgaard and Warburg heralded but not yet complete, was to be what can be researched about the impact of cyborg religion on religion in the offline world. It would include comparisons of structures of authority and knowledge between online and offline groups, such as the study of Barker (2005) on cult groupings, and of Campbell (2007) on how religious authority is asserted in online conversations about religion. Cross-cultural perspectives are also noted here, highlighted with emphasis by the Journal of CMC (12:3), and in Pauline Hope Cheong’s (2007) deliberations on a geography of virtual sacred space.

These new “waves” took a detour from quantitative approaches to online religion – counting sites, users, demographics, to consider ethnographic pursuits and sociological ponderings about the humans who were doing the religion in this world. Yet as the first wave showed a presumption about what is religious, these sets of work tend to make presumptions about the Internet, specifically, as a realm of being religious that is discrete and separate from the world outside. It is time for a new wave, and a new cyborg.

More to come…

In 1927 our fascinations and fears over the possibilities of technology and humanity were placed into light and sound in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, set in a world where robots and humans lived alongside one another, where humans’ desire for the perfect robot led to the creation of a being half-human and half-metal, and where her demise told the world that humanity’s greatest quality is its weakness. The film depicted two states of being, one hard and one wet, each desiring intently to be more like the other, yet never successfully joined.

While Utopian and hellish images and narratives of the cyborg have flooded our culture in that century, the term cyborg has offered us a metaphor for considering both how technology shapes our humanness and how we add humanity to the machinery around us. And, in particular to my field of interest, it can be a metaphor for how we are religious with, in and on the Internet, and how we wrap religious ideas and ideals to ICTs. For while some may think of a cyborg as one whose limbs or insides are part machine, others ask “Are you not a cyborg the moment your hand is on your mouse?”

This first, McLuhanesque impression of the cyborg sees the computer, like other electronic media, as extensions of the senses. Web sites become destinations that we “arrive at” when we type in URLs or click hyperlinks. First projects of research into religion online, what Højsgaard and Warburg (2005) considered “the first wave” of research in the field, seemed primarily concerned with questions of such journeys and destinations. These pieces of fact-finding endeavoured to answer:

• What does online religion look like?
• What can people do online and why would they do it?
• What kind of people go online for religion and why?

In 2004, Hoover, Clark and Rainie published a report for the Pew Internet and American Life series based on a widespread and in depth study of American Internet users. They asked simple questions of their sample, including “Do you go to the Internet for religious purposes?”. They found that most users of religious Internet sites were active participants in religious activities offline, and that Internet use was to enhance religious activity in other parts of their lives.

Two years earlier, Helland’s article in the journal Religion (32:4, 2002) suggested that “religion online” and “online religion” are two distinct phenomena – one being the online impression of an online community, structure or practice, and the other a religion whose source, and perhaps entire being, is on the Internet. So while many use the Internet solely as a source of information to affect offline religious life, there are some of us for whom the Internet is an exhaustively valid place to ask spiritual questions, seek moral guidance.

In the same journal edition, Karaflogka presented her study on how religious language is translated on web sites, using the home pages of various Muslim groups on the Internet. Here she showed how organisations present themselves to an online world. Arthur gave us a look into how nature religion can manifest online, and MacWilliams considered how certain religious practices, such as pilgrimages, can be taken from topography to technology.

This “first wave” of research into online religion sought to uncover the phenomenon of religious practice on the Internet, as an evolutionary step of a differently technologised society. It did focus on how religious life online compares to offline religion, and even evaluated its merits and pitfalls against what we knew about religious life in the “real world”. In doing so, however, it tended, mostly, to start with preconceived understandings of “what religious practice” was, evident in its methodologies. What was considered a religious web site, or what could be seen as a purely religious practice, was based on their similarities with what we saw in mosques and coven gatherings and dangling from car rear-view mirrors.

Højsgaard and Warburg believe, as do I, that while talk of “waves” of research into online religion implies some chronological development, it is perhaps better to see them as shifts in focus which have generally occurred over time, but not universally. Some research fit into different “waves” at different times, based on different circumstances, and different universities, research traditions and countries.

More to come…

While coding data from blogs I found an old reference to a quiz that tells you what kind of Christian you are. I played and to little surprise I was place in the postmodern/emergent camp. But then I tooled around the site and found this out:

You Scored as Goth That’s awesome! Go you! Goth 74% Emo Kid 73% Geek/Nerd 73% Loner 60% Punk 53% Stoner 40% Hot 33% Prep 13% “Ghetto” 0% Jock 0%

From www.quizfarm.com

Really? Me? I should get some of the old clothes out. No doubt they’d still fit perfectly.