fishers, surfers and casters

My awesome friend Heidi Campbell has scored a pocket of money from Texas A&M University to seed a Virtual Centre for Research into New Media, Religion and Digital Culture. She’s looking around for people who may have any ideas, opinions or resources to share. If you’re one of those people, check out the Facebook page and contact her there.

Disclaimer: Okay, so I’m going to start talking a lot about a religion that isn’t mine. I hope that by reading you will see that I respect this faith, and consider its members kith and kin to Christians, cousins that have been distant too long. If there’s anything you read here that you disagree with, please comment and let me know where I may be mistaken.

Malcolm X was a separationist until he went to Mecca. Life had taught him that American blacks and whites could not live in harmony, and that freedom could only come from the usurping of power from one race to the other. Anything better would be a pipe dream, a fairy tale. Then he went to Mecca. On his return, he announced that living together as siblings rather than enemies is possible, because he had seen it. Anything better is not only possible; it is actual, it is living and it is present.

We who only ever get superficial glimpses of this holy city, in stories and pictures that flood Western media to either glamorise or demonise, but always make alien and unknowable, could describe Mecca as a virtual reality. Engaging all senses in ritual and spectacle, entrants lose themselves in the mass, immersed in a spirit of communion. Yet while many abide there, few reside there. It is an city out of time, both eternal and momentary, a cittá invisibile, a quantum place. Politics and commerce cram themselves into its doorways, and sometimes creep in, but are always thwarted. Even the temporal self is relinquished. Individuals shed themselves of the clothes and adornments of ordinary life, so that there are no wives or pop-stars, kings or doctors. They let the place write on them with white linen, rubbing out their everyday identity.

Recent conversations with some Muslim friends give me the impression that the converse is true. Mecca is not the virtual reality; Earth is. In Mosques as in homes and offices at designated prayer moments, Muslims turn their bodies in Mecca’s direction, and turn their bodies into nodes in the network of Islam. For Muslims, daily living is but an emanation, a projected image, of the true life that is found far away in space and time. The Hajj, a pillar of Islam and a directive for all in the faith, means pilgrimage. It is notable that Muslims are asked that, at least once in their lives, to not be in Mecca, but go there. While the experience of being in the holy city may transform the individual, what is important for the faith is the leaving their home and returning, so that the world may be transformed.

I will not be so arrogant and simple as to say that Cyberspace is to the spiritual Cyborg as Mecca is to the Muslim. I will say that both Cyborgs and Muslims have something to teach us about our virtual/actual dichotomy. Two bloggers in my study said to me:

[Blogging] provides new opportunities but at the end of the day it’s still not the same level of community. But it helps us keep in touch. For example, these guys are far more significant for me in my Christian life than people in my local church. [...] I wouldn’t survive in a local church without connections like this. Talking with these guys every other night sort of helps you survive [...] it’s one thing being marginalised, it’s another thing to be able to talk about it over the net.

I actually need one foot in both or else I don’t survive.

It seems the Cyborg identifies her/his situation as on the edge of both real world and online community life. Neither are complete. The spirituality of the Cyborg is not named by their residence in Cyberspace, but in the pilgrimage to and from it, in an endeavour to both be transformed and reform the communities and relationships in daily living.