fishers, surfers and casters

I presented at Monash University’s Religious Communication conference on Thursday. It was basically a mash-up of a few recent blog posts. It seemed to go down a treat. Raised some interesting questions and conversations around the study of religious web sites and their users and participants. Here is the set of slides that I used. If you want to know more, just ask.

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.

In January I wrote a series of posts on this blog (beginning with this one) where I spouted the term “Cyborg” around quite free of care. I used it as merely a metaphor for human relationships to the Internet, in particular online religion, in relation to the assumptions and foci of those who research online religion. In these posts I did not pretend that understandings of this metaphor was the best or only way to understand the progression of that research progression, nor did I pretend that the posts offered a comprehensive overview of the use of the term. Indeed, there are many ways to talk about the Cyborg, in fantasy and in reality.

AI, Johnny Mnemonic, The Bionic Woman, Metropolis, The Animatrix, Terminator, and even Inspector Gadget offered us glimpses of the possible futures either where machines become human or parts of our original humanity is replaced or enhanced by machines. Even the Alien series of films, which is primarily about biological monsters, has running throughout a subplot beginning with an android whose amoral loyalty to government leads him to betray the protagonist and ends with an android whose “programming” leads her to betray her creators in order to save the protagonist. Our journalists promote the notion that life imitates art in their retelling of stories of people who replace artificial eyes with video cameras, prosthetic fingers with USB flash drives, and the instalment of bionic devices to not just overcome disability, but enhance performance. We have painted our popular culture with images of victorious humans who have used technology to conquer the human condition and of a further fallen humanity at the mercy of machines around and inside them.

For Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis, the Cyborgs created in these stories are not just science fiction versions of gods and monsters, for they are also heroes and villains. They are “narrative figures who are helping us to thicken the plots we are weaving with very real, and very spunky, technologies” (p. 189). We add story, values, beliefs around technology because that’s what humans do to all things: we add meaning to things in order to know what to do with and around them. Our stories around machines are rich because we are aware of how much we have achieved alongside them, and how much we don’t yet know we can do with them. Indeed, the popularity of Tamagotchis in the previous decade was not just because children wanted to play pet-owner with a primitive picture of an AI animal (prompting so much moral panic about the future of owning and loving a flesh-and-bone pet), but because children know their future will be surrounded by machines with whom they will relate on not just practical levels, but emotional ones too, seeing how their parents “love and hate” their computers, televisions and mobile phones.

In my thesis I spend some time talking about how the history of Internet technology is laden with values that mean the Internet is socially constructed, and there is a religious element to this too. From its birth in military laboratories, through its release to academic institutions and hacker students, to its introduction to the general market, the Internet carries tags of freedom, intimacy, democracy, secrecy, isolation and domination. These values guide our approach to the technology and our relationships to others through it. Religious constructions include the notion that cyberspace is a realm outside the material world, free from material constraints of time, space and power, and the potential for a more just society and fuller existence. Religion can also label the Internet as a demonising and diabolical force, tempting people away from real relationships and stable communities.

These values are also formed in the context of production and consumption of all technologies, in a period where the more advanced the device, the more “like us” it is made and sold. Computers become personal computers become desktops, that we use by opening windows and clicking images, navigating it in the way we would a house, getting to know it as if it were another person. The mobile phone becomes the personal digital assistant, that we carry around not just in case somebody wants to talk with us, but because at times we may need to talk with it. Moreover, talking semiotically, we “write” on these devices, by customising desktop interfaces, adding pictures and wallpapers, making ringtones out of our favourite pop tracks, in order to make them ours. Machines are not just tools at our disposal but are culturally produced markers by which we construct our patterns of daily living, our relationships and our identities. We are Cyborg because we make machines like us in order to use them in the making of ourselves.

Yet while the “humanising” of technology is evident in the development of the Cyborg story, there is another side to it: the “machination” of the human person in modern biology, epistemology and sociology. The discovery of the chromosome prompted us to wonder how much of our impulses are guided by chemical software, and that the ultimate purpose of our existence is to maintain and recreate storage units for the information. Theorising the mind has also evolved into computing language, where memory is a network of neural pathways, and knowledge is a pattern of connecting between the outside world, our senses and the network. The poststructuralist sees human society as built by networks of power that entrance and control the individual into viewing the world, and his or her place in it, in a certain myopic way that is so overwhelming that should the network be taken away, the individual would not know why to get out of bed in the morning. Knowledge is intertwined with ideology, designed and communicated not just to enable a person’s comprehension of the outside world, but to confine to a particular role in that world. Atheism, while seen by the religious as an attack on the truth of revelation, is more an attack on the religious institutions which have become part of the great oppressive ideological machine by which we have been “programmed”.

In the apparent loss of the human soul in late modernity, past the point of no return to a time of magic and mysticism, the Cyborg has looked to technology to rediscover its humanity. Erik Davis (in the same book) tells us that technology has helped the Cyborg rise to a sense of meaning and renewal in recent history, by explaining the philosophies and stories of Gurdjieff’s “machine-man” and L Ron Hubbard’s “computer-mind”, and mentioning that while members of the counterculture revolution of the 1960s rejected new technologies as a form of abuse and imprisonment, lauded the invention of synthetic drugs like LSD to bring them to new states of awareness.

And to the Internet, a machine, but laden with possibilities and magic and mysticism, the new Cyborg sees an opportunity to find a new heaven and a new earth, free from the machinations of the body and material society.

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