fishers, surfers and casters

Introducing the Journal of Technology, Theology, and Religion!

~ an online journal, edited by Joseph F. Duggan ~

Theologians and theorists interested in religion are beginning to address technology on their own terms as a community-enabling tool. Religious community has surfaced through a variety of different dimensions, including online church opportunities, digitized diaspora, and the application of diverse modes of theological criticism to new technologies. JTTR’s articles in the first six months will reflect popular interests among theologians such as virtual church, Facebook, cyborgs, and identity formation through cyberspace. We invite submissions on these and related topics, such as faith and video games, global connectedness and religious communities, online pedagogies and religious education, divisions created by technology use, religious attitudes toward technological innovation, ecology and sustainability, nanotechnology, genetic technology, and more.

Our international editorial board includes Albert Borgmann, Heidi Campbell, Debbie Herring, Noreen Herzfeld, T. R. B. Hutchings, Athina Karatzogianni, Lerone Martin, Sanjoy Mazmudar, Carl Mitcham, Pedro Oiarzabal, and Brent Waters. Thirty percent of our readership comes from 20 countries outside the United States.

JTTR can publish essays of any length, although most submission should be approximately 20-25 manuscript pages. Please follow Chicago Manual of Style.

Send articles, reviews, or queries to the JTTR editor:

Joseph F. Duggan, jfd AT techandreligion DOT com

Visit the journal at www.techandreligion.com.

See the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/techandreligion.com.

Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the fourth wave of research into religion online. In this wave it’s recognised that “nobody goes online anymore”, in the sense that the Internet is not something that we intentionally access, necessarily, but that it’s constantly “on” and on the fringe of our daily actions and interactions. It’s also acknowledged that, given our increased access to not just read online text, but to both create text and shape its design and structure, we are capable of making the Internet look like us. Online identities are not shaped just by what information we upload, but by the information we read, share, tag, filter, etc. Researchers into religion online should just think about religion in the religious texts that are created and dispersed in the ether. Rather they should think about what is religious about the Internet that we cultivate.

I am thinking that these issues become more salient when we think about Internet access through mobile technologies, such as phones and e-readers, yet this has been neglected in my own research. I’ve recently been given the opportunity to collaborate on a research project on the iPhone as an object through which religious experience is accessed and mediated. I have some preliminary thoughts which revolve around four key words:

Device – how does the iPhone as an object that is seen and held by its users create the aesthetic conditions for religious experience? Historically, our Internet experiences have been framed by the technology that has sat on desks in private work or study rooms, family rooms, on our laps. It shouldn’t be overlooked that the location of these devices have played a part in the total sensory experience of being online. The pocket-sized, hand-held device, then, changes that experience.

App – how does the applications’ software, based on the operating software of the device, frame the religious text that is produced, consumed and exchanged between connected users? The graphic user interface of the home computer has provided us with vehicle for interactions with others and with the technology, and there has always been an aesthetic dimension to this.

Mobility – given that the iPhone is a personal device, how do users feel a connection to an aesthetic community away from the community’s physical place? Online communities are noted for their lack of place, rather defined by shared symbols and languages than by geography. This is not new. Evidence of community formations through communications beyond place even exist in the Bible. What becomes salient for mobile-mediated communities may be the way that people interact with this sense of place. A friend who is Catholic priest told me of a baptism he conducted recently at his local church. The congregation was full of twenty-somethings, who he believed weren’t really present, given they spent most of their time at the ceremony tweeting, heads down, thumbs a-tapping. After the ceremony ended, these congregants mentioned to him what their online friends thought of what was happening during the service, through the replies to their tweets. My friend discovered there were more people at the service than he could physically see and speak with, but who were nonetheless “there”, and involved in what was going on. Mobile technologies allow people to interact online with people away from their computers and back in churches, and allows people not in churches to interact with people who are.

Cloud – to what extent is physical place known and valued to users, given that all religious text is stored in the “cloud” (i.e. on a server in an unknown location)? “Cloud” has joined our growing set of metaphors for connecting online. More and more, we are dependent on our connection to remote servers to store information and do daily tasks, in order to keep our devices small and more mobile. While the “cloud” simply refers to a computer in a location we may be unaware of, the use of the term brings many connotations that will impact on how we think and act with our devices.

At CMRC, David Michel, from Dalhousie University (Canada), told his story of a small conservative Christian community on the Atlantic side of Canada, who wanted to go live online, by video-streaming their services.

One of the big questions affronting the small congregation was what could be in the view of the camera, and what would be shielded from the eyes of viewers online. Some people believed there were parts of the inside of the church that shouldn’t be seen by people who weren’t in the building. Others believed their were sections of the service where private information about members were shared, and also shouldn’t be seen by those participating through computer screens. For David, but more so for me who listened to his story, it raised questions about how people negotiate private and public in a church community, and how people consider the internet as a public space.

It seems, by the small introduction to the church community that I was given, that the notion of the church service as a public event had been eroded away among its members by its recent history. In the years where the congregation’s numbers dwindled, and where one-time visitors were seen increasingly seldom, the church service was conducted among people who “knew” each other to the point where being together was a private event. Even if there were people present at a service whom congregants did not “know”, at least congregants were fully aware in the space of who their audience was, to the point of better control over how to present information and themselves in a setting that appeared private.

Yet for the congregants, the Internet was seen as the opposite. Going live through video-streaming was, for them, like placing themselves in a panopticon, a Big Brother House where *everyone* could see them, and they could see nobody in return. Going live online for them was a test where the search for new and distant friends and fellow congregants required the relinquishment of control over their own church environment.

Somewhere in this dichotomy of “landline church = private” versus “online church = public” is the reality, which deserves further exploration and requires time and experimentation. I wish them luck.

At CMRC this week I saw two presentations on religious videos and personalities. The first was by Rianne Subijanto and Nabil Echchaibi from the University of Colorado (US) and explored the rise of the “TV Muslim preacher” in Egypt and Indonesia. The second was by Denis Bekkering from the University of Waterloo (Canada) and focussed on the rise, fall and slow rise again of a US web-based Christian evagelist.

Echchaibi and Subijanto’s presentation started with the question “How do Muslims relate to their religion daily through mass media?” and used examples from YouTube, religious channels, and even a reality TV show called Imam Muda, where contestants battle it out to be the best rookie Imam, and the winner is ordained. They made the following conclusions:

1. That Islam on TV exists in struggles between modern/moderate and orthodox/islamist struggles on the political level and in the public sphere
2. That the television personality acts as a religious brand with which viewers/users find a connection and through which they can express and work on their religious identity
3. Television allows for the rethinking of religious imagery and symbolism, including even the way the Imam dresses
4. It appeared to me that the videos borrowed much from prosperity model of (tele-)evangelism. The presenters noted that the producers of these videos and channels borrowed business models from American televangelists, however the new “messages” found in the videos also reflected local preaching styles and some traditions.

Bekkering’s presentation focussed on the struggle to maintain authority in the face of protest in YouTube. Focussing on recent videos of an American evangelist, who a few years ago lost much popularity after his extra-marital affair was exposed, Bekkering discusses how the evangelist’s ministry endeavours to prevent and block protest on his site through the active moderation of comments on his youTube page, and the editing of videos where protestation appears in the filming of his ministry events.

I found in both presentations a great comparison between “viewers” and “users” in the negotiation of religious text, meaning and authority in videos in both platforms. I also saw a great potential, which was touched upon, in the examination of aesthetic approaches to the construction of religious authority (how scenery is used to promote the authority of the presenters in the videos, and how an “image” is created for the promotion of religious branding). I would like to talk with them more about it.