metropolisIn 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…