Religion in Cyberspace
Well I have to concur with others' posts that this book is fantastic! I am not quite done with it yet, as I am spending far more time contemplating the articles than I ever expected. As of this time, I have only gotten through Chapter nine, but will finish the book before class. My head is swimming with a multitude of thoughts ranging from content/information overload to identity and community development, to the worship of technology itself, to the state of contemporary society and the seeming shift from the face to face in part due to the constraints on our time and competing interests.
As I have gone through this course, a focus of mine has been to learn how I can expand the face and reach of the Episcopal Church through interactive technology. As I sit here now, pondering our class last week and this book in particular, I'm beginning to contemplate a new series of questions all together.
1)With the dynamic nature and sheer quantity of information sharing, relationship development, social trust and the evolution of technology itself, are we better suited to try and develop a methodology or lens for sorting through the tsunami of information that is currently available, that will help folks discern what is valid/important to them and what is not? I know that this is a precarious position and by its very nature risks the type of censorship that was also discussed; that's not what I want to do.
2) Or, is the issue really more about taking to heart the disenfranchisement with traditional religions and addressing that as a root cause for people seeking out NRMs online in order to have needs met.
3) What about the state of our contemporary society and all of this need for instant gratification and its impact on the way we interact with each other. What are we losing in relationship?
4) It seems intuitive that people are going to seek out and investigate or try new things as they come available; akin to teenage rebellion. It seems to me that in time, the rebellious/curious pendulum would swing back towards center. However, given the rate at which technology is changing the face of our existence, are we losing the opportunity for that pendulum to swing back? Have we lost the opportunity for market correction?
5) And lastly, how do we head off the incredible divide between the developed West and those areas of the world that simply do not have access to the Internet? Interestingly enough, my immediate concern was not on how much the non connected lose out on, but what those of us who are connected are missing in the rich cultures and ways of being and relating to each other by the non-connected. The technology divide creates a two way loss.
For now, this is simply a dump of the main thoughts running through my head that I had to get out and sleep over tonight. A more coherent post tomorrow.
posted by Ithaca Seminarian @ 7:58 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Lisa,
Thanks so much for your post! You raise so many good questions. I especially liked #1, but also appreciated the way you recognized an implicit power dynamic in the very nature of the question. It reminds me of teaching. When you act as a teacher to someone who clearly has less knowledge (at least about a particular topic) than you do, you are inevitably making decisions about content, and the manner in which the content is relayed, that are normative. This in no way undermines the edification process, but it does change its character. It ceases to be presented as somehow abstract and antecedently real. Instead, it's much more provisional and concrete. All this to say that I think #1 is sorely needed, but it is extremely hard. Perhaps that is why we intuitively back away from it, acknowledging the skill level and maturity it requires (?)
I also found your final question incredibly helpful! (Thank you, again!) I have been trying to think critically about how we use the word "revolution." There is the somewhat blatant sense in which we deploy it - Zapatistas and Black Power. But there are other applications - the technological revolution, Dewey's "revolution in the seat of intellectual authority." (A Common Faith - Terry Lectures, 1934) No doubt, we could use a discursive lens supplied by political theory to unpack these latter locutions. Let's stay with that a bit. Does revolution (even a technological one) have to be fomented by those who do not have power? Are there instances when revolution must be initiated and then disseminated in a top down fashion?
I ask because I attended a really revolutionary talk by Lawrence Lessig (Stanford law professor and author of Code and other noteworthy books). Lessig is definitely a hero of mine and I was curious about his new project - Change Congress. http://change-congress.org/
He identified our sundry and critical political problems with a legislative system that is essentially kow-towing to fiscal interests. Lobbyists, PACs, earmarks, etc. - these tools have spawned incredibly corrosive effects. The enervation cuts deep - whether a particular political entity, Save the Children or Green Peace, has achieved good is somewhat beside the point - the system itself catalyzes widespread pervasive mistrust. In other words, a PAC may actually be beneficial, but we have no way of knowing. The lack of transparency and accountability inherent in the system necessitates fragmentary endeavors. Discrete gains are achieved at the cost of ubiquitous malaise.
Although it was presented in a highly accessible fashion, you can already see just how complicated the talk truly was. The reason why I relay so much of its content is to unearth and probe one of its innate presuppositions: "this revolution must be instigated from the top." We, those attending the lecture and our socio-cultural kin, are the ones who have the skills necessary to dismantle the specious legislative process.
At a certain level, such a claim seemed obvious; we are being trained to recognize these types of problems and we should address them. I am certainly lauding this move. But what of educational institutions and the distribution of resources that created us? Is there not some deeper plane of inequity? If we are members of minorities, how did our minority status affect our accumulation of the skills that are now so necessary? Why is it that only a select group can tackle such vast and intricate challenges?
This seems, to me, inextricably related to your fifth question. It is not just us in the first world who must deliver technology and its benefits to those who lack both. We are also primed to learn much, probably more, about how we created such an unequal distribution of wealth in the first place. I don't know how societies that employ different manners of knowing will be preserved. This loss reminds me of when linguists bemoan the extinction of spoken languages. And yet, I think there is an equal or greater condescension when we valorize cultures for merely being "different." This creates a bizarre scenario where we can't challenge our own epistemological lens (to the degree this is possible) and the way our conceptions of others may be equally imperialistic (which is really the substance of question #1).
I don't want to sound overly pessimistic. I actually do think there are tenable solutions to these predicaments. But the first step should be discerning, as realistically as possible, the intricate and appreciable intransigence of the challenge. I hope to shed more light on this in our next class when we talk about Charles Taylor.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home