Читать книгу Virtual Communion - Katherine G. Schmidt - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe present technological moment attracts the thoughts of a great variety of writers and scholars. Academic theologians, pastoral ministers, and theologically inclined scholars of other disciplines are among the voices one finds in the choir of reflection about the internet. These accounts, by and large, reflect the sensibilities of Gaudium et Spes in their earnest attempt to understand the modern world in the light of faith. They pay close attention to the “griefs and anxieties” engendered by our technological milieu, and find some space to laud its contribution to the “joys and hopes” of humanity. The former, however, has tended to dominate theological reflection on the topic to date, and there is surely much in present technological culture calling for critical thought. Theological critique inevitably rests upon theological assumptions, two of which I aim to explicate here. However, we would do well to remember that especially in a culture that is increasingly hostile to outward displays of religiosity, theological critique is always tempted to a certain mentality of entrenchment and defensiveness.
The two theological loci that dominate theological discussion on the topic of the internet are the church (specifically in its local form) and the Incarnation. One must be careful not to divide these two, as it is theologically inappropriate to consider one without the other: Christian ecclesiology is necessarily incarnational, and the doctrine of the Incarnation carries ecclesiological consequences. This reciprocity appears in the theological work examined below. In short, much of what has been said by theologians on this topic has focused on those aspects of the internet which relate to these doctrinal positions. Theologians have appealed to the central doctrine of the Incarnation—God made flesh in Jesus Christ—in order to critique the apparently disembodied character of virtual life. They have appealed to the centrality of the church, especially in its local form, in order to critique virtually mediated social relationships, positing the church as the ideal social institution and mediator of relationships. With so much of our daily lives being mediated virtually, theologians have sought to bring the critical power of the Christian tradition to bear on our technological culture, focusing specifically on what the Incarnation and the church mean for us and our relationship to the internet.
What follows is a discussion of five characteristics of the internet around which theological reflection has clustered: anonymity, vitriol, authority, access, and disembodiment. This five-part taxonomy is necessary but problematic. It is necessary because it reflects the major themes found in theologies of the internet to date. These five aspects provide insight into the theological stakes of the internet itself. It is problematic because none of the authors surveyed here take on all five aspects together as I do here. More often than not, two or more are considered together to make a larger point. I have chosen to separate them in order to tease out commonalities among theologies of the internet. These five aspects reflect the two doctrinal loci above. Each one has serious theological implications for both incarnational and ecclesiological reasons. Although individual theologians have given different arguments and inflections to these characteristics, all of them are grounded in the desire to promote the centrality of the embodied revelation in Jesus Christ, as well as the place of the church as the mediating institution of that revelation for communities of faith.
I focus on more general theological accounts of the internet, spending less time with those which ask questions about the role of technology in specific pastoral situations. One of the primary assumptions of this entire project is that in order to address any of these questions on the pastoral level, we must be willing to examine the theological stakes of whatever technology we find relevant to the church. The same goes for moral evaluations of our online interactions. We have become mired in discussions of pornography, personal distraction via technological gadgets, video game violence, and the like without asking deeper questions about what the internet actually is from a specifically theological point of view. We have been too eager to point out new sins and old sins-done-new that we find online without undertaking any prolonged reflection on how to interpret this technological and cultural moment within the economy of grace. We have begun the task set out in Gaudium et Spes, as we have found and continue to find the anxieties of our age. We have yet to delve deeply into the possibilities of that moment, and to look for moments of hope in the light of the gospel.
The theological work surveyed here is important and worthwhile. It demonstrates the beginning of an effort, as a discipline, to engage in the complex technological culture in which we write, study, and teach. We are only beginning to examine the important theological questions raised by our virtual life together, and the extant theological treatments of the internet demonstrate what doctrines are proving to be most important for these questions.
Anonymity
The internet affords users an unprecedented degree of anonymity for their interpersonal communication and their engagements with content which is mediated by the internet. In terms of the former, one is able to access all kinds of content—images, sounds, videos, etc.—without anyone knowing it has been accessed. One can also produce and distribute content relatively anonymously.1 Interpersonal communication of all kinds online is also done anonymously in many contexts, through the use of handles, screennames, and avatars. This anonymity can be both intentional and unintentional. Sometimes, a user intentionally hides her identity from others or to avoid attaching herself to any piece of content. Other times, the very nature of the medium itself requires that a user’s identity is hidden from others.
“Anonymity,” however, can be a misleading category here. Etymologically, anonymity refers to the state of being without a name. In the case of online interpersonal communication, therefore, most cases of “anonymity” are actually moments of pseudonymity. By appropriating this term from its traditional usage in literature, we get a better sense of what really is at stake in so-called “anonymous” exchanges: disguise. Online anonymity is not entirely about individuals operating without names per se, but about their ability to produce words and images without accountability. For example, users regularly comment on articles or videos online under their real names. Even when an individual uses his real name to post a comment online, he remains anonymous to nearly every person who reads it. The user will never meet the readers in person and though they may attempt to hold him accountable with a counter-comment, the user can simply ignore them or remove himself from the conversation with no real social consequences.
Social consequences are at the very heart of this aspect of the internet. Theorists have found anonymity one of the most important aspects of the internet because it challenges the social constructs which hold our common life together.2 Virtual life is forcing us to reconsider the categories of dialogue, debate, and social interaction itself. What such anonymous (really, pseudonymous) comments lack, however, is the accountability one might find in non-virtual settings. One might argue that the threat of embarrassment, shame, or confrontation looms in non-virtual interpersonal and public interactions, and therefore might alter individual choices. I may not say this comment or present that picture, the argument goes, in “real” life for fear of embarrassment. A classic example is the difference between clicking on a pornographic video online and going to buy a pornographic video in person. The primary difference is that in the latter, I have to risk the reaction of other human beings (the shopkeeper, the passersby) that I do not in the former. A more precise description, then, might be “facelessness,” although the term is less elegant and has less purchase than “anonymity.” Therefore, I retain the term here, fully aware of its imprecision.
This aspect of virtual life is of great interest to theologians, especially from the standpoint of moral theology. If Christian ethics is about how to live well and attain true happiness in the light of revelation, it is no surprise that the internet is quickly becoming an important site for theological reflection.3 Investigating what it means to “live well” necessarily entails investigating the choices we make and how those choices affect others and ourselves. The anonymity on which so much of virtual life relies—both intentionally and unintentionally—is directly related to the Christian view of the human person. Christian anthropology is incarnational in that it understands the dignity of the human body in the context of the redemption of the body found in Jesus Christ. Theologians seek to maintain the unity and dignity of the human person in the face of virtual activities that would undermine it precisely by means of anonymity.4
The claim of Christian anthropology against an individual choice to watch pornography, for example, concerns not only the threat to a person’s individual relationship to God but also to his or her relationship to other people. When a person watches pornography, she not only undermines her own dignity but also the dignity of all involved in its production, as well as those around her who may be adversely affected by her formation in watching pornography. Personal exchanges and engagements with mediated content affect our relationships to each other. As the Body of Christ, the community is both particular and universal. In addition, a lack of integrity in its members affects the Body. This makes the question of anonymity pertinent from an ecclesiological perspective as well.
In her work on doing theology online in Aquinas on the Web?, Jana Bennett draws on several Christian bloggers to investigate the relationship between the internet and theological discourse. One of the most quoted bloggers in Bennett’s work is Susan Bauer, who at one point writes the following: “There are aspects of digital culture that we should fight against, not because they are ‘not print’ but because they are not godly.”5 Bauer goes on to list these “not godly” aspects, including “the anonymity which allows us to lie and deceive each other.”6 This is the persistent worry about anonymity online, from both Christians and non-Christians alike. The lack of trust that already obtains between strangers in our culture—even between people who live in the same neighborhood—is exacerbated by the ability to conceal or falsify one’s identity, appearance, and personality through the medium of the internet. Some Christian theologians, then, have looked at the internet’s characteristic anonymity as a symptom of much more serious diseases that plague modern life.
Following Stanley Hauerwas’ postliberal project, George Randels uses “narrative, character, and community . . . to analyze cyberspace.”7 He argues that cyberspace is one of the clearest products of the modern condition, as it “involves a conception of the person primarily as an isolated, autonomous, and often anonymous individual rather than as part of a larger community.”8 Anonymity, for Randels, is the high point of the excesses of liberal individualism. Using multiuser domains or MUDs as an illustrative example, Randels contends that “anonymity permits players to be known only by what they explicitly project, and that it encourages some of individualism’s excesses.”9 By virtue of its anonymity, then, sociality online is insufficient in light of the fullness of social life one finds in the church. Randels’ aim is to set the church over and against the internet by virtue of anonymity reflecting the problems of liberalism: “Atomistic and excessive individualism contrasts sharply with the church, most other forms of community, and most visions of ethics.”10
Along these lines, Gene Veith and Christopher Stamper write, “The screen name—unlike an actual name—has no social context, presenting no family, with no community ties or obligations.”11 Once again, anonymity precludes traditional social consequences and enables, it would seem, undesirable choices. A “social context” is important for the maintenance of these social consequences, consequences that Veith and Stamper refer to vaguely as “ties or obligations.” The “social context” par excellence for Veith and Stamper, as well as Randels, is the local church. The local community is inherently “faceful”: an individual physically sees other members, and that seeing alters the choices he makes. This seeing of faces not only provides him with the social consequences to preclude certain behaviors. It also provides a person with examples for living well in light of the gospel. Here, then, the local church becomes the antidote to a digital life veiled in anonymity.
The local church is also “nameful.” The Christian church grew and continues to grow by means of witnesses. Named individuals were willing who give their lives, through martyrdom or other means of sainthood, for Christ. They are accountable to their communities, both friendly and oppressive, in a way that challenges the growing preference for anonymity in the social life we find online. Such accountability, the argument goes, relies on an honesty that is undermined by the inherent deception (pseudonymity) of a screenname or avatar.
Having a name is also theologically important because of the Incarnation. Although theologians have tended to focus on the Incarnation while addressing the concern of disembodiment online (treated below), part of Jesus’ being fully human is that he had a name that located him as a human being from a particular place: Jesus of Nazareth is God Incarnate. Perhaps online anonymity is giving Christian theologians pause because anonymity seems to run against the grain of not only the local church community but also against its picture of both humanity and divinity. Perhaps it is more than just a problem with deception and all of the ways by which we may be enabled to do and say immoral things; it is a problem of the very way we think about who we are and who God is.12
Vitriol
The question of anonymity ushers in a myriad of issues regarding the phenomenon of online nastiness. As a catch-all for the many ways we have found to mistreat each other in virtual space, I refer to this second aspect as vitriol. Theologians often focus on how people treat each other online because they are inherently interested in how human beings relate to one another. There is a common implication that online interaction is even worse than the sinfulness we face in ourselves and others offline: people are meaner to one another, practice less patience, and operate with less shame toward their fellow human beings than they do in offline contexts. Although vitriol is often tied to anonymity, people continue to do and say terrible things to each other under their own names and faces. Thus while anonymity and vitriol are related, it is important to treat them separately. More importantly, the theological concern over anonymity is much bigger than the way in which it enables vitriol.
In a short piece in Word & World, Adam Copeland considers “each [of the Ten Commandments] as it relates to information communication technologies and digital life.”13 For the second commandment, Copeland argues, “It reminds us that comments should be left with kindness, humility and love. As one Christian blogging site states in its comments policy, ‘Blessed are those who refuse to insult or slander others, even if they have been disrespected themselves. They show us all the better way.’”14 America, the Jesuit weekly magazine, once suspended its comment feature on articles for this very concern, though they have since returned them to the website.15
Bennett provides perhaps the most sustained account of vitriol by focusing on one particular online discussion. Because of her focus on theological discourse online, she focuses on a discussion over Rob Bell’s controversial Love Wins, a book that questions common notions of heaven and hell within Christianity. Directly after its publication, Love Wins became a hot topic of discussion in online Christian circles, often functioning as a kind of litmus test for various ideological positions. Throughout her treatment of the discussion, Bennett does note the place of anonymity in the conversation, but focuses more extensively on the vitriolic nature of the conversation. She makes the claim that there is something in the very form of the internet that encourages vitriol. She writes, “The internet’s architecture makes skimming very easy because of the way web pages tend to be designed. So it would seem that the very nature of the internet forms us to think about others in ways that are dehumanizing.”16 Elsewhere she argues that “our technology does not allow us to view ourselves as created by God, with God as our source, nor does it allow us to understand ourselves as sinners, particularly when it comes to perpetuating evils like racism.”17 Her assertion is that the very form of mediated communication online contributes to or even encourages discourse that does not respect the humanity of our interlocutors. This is especially important for Bennett’s focus on theological discourse online. Citing Dyer’s piece in Christianity Today, she writes, “The medium itself generates rash, hasty responses, compared with the careful, measured reflection that good theology seeks, or at the least, the kinds of virtuous interactions Christians seek to promote.”18
But Bennett is not keen to give up on theological discourse online. Instead, she points to some ways in which Christians in particular moderate their own discussions. She goes on to cite self-imposed rules and guidelines instituted by online discussion groups. According to Bennett, “Part of what we can see at work in these communal guidelines and checklists is the development of what ethicists call ‘practical wisdom’ or ‘practical reasoning.’”19 She goes on to argue for the place of the local community in forming individuals by means of moral exemplars.
An appeal to the Incarnation is probably the obvious for the aspect of vitriol. Theologians have made appeals to charity, modeled perfectly by Christ, as a means of combating it within both interpersonal attacks and in remediating questionable content. This appeal to charity is often tied to the importance of the local community, as in the case Bennett draws out of the online discussion over Bell’s book wherein one user suggests that one should only say something to another user if he could say it to the person offline as well.
The central question about online vitriol seems to be the one raised by Bennett: Is the “architecture” of the internet, by its very nature, encouraging or even creating such vitriol? Does the internet create more nastiness, either between people or from a moral point of view with regard to the myriad pieces of content which it remediates? In short, it is unclear whether so much theological energy should be put toward the how of mediating vitriol and not toward the what or why of vitriol itself.20
Authority
Thirdly, theologians have focused on the various ways in which the internet disrupts traditional loci of authority. One popular version of this is the worry over how websites have replaced papercraft books as the tools for garnering knowledge on any given topic. Another version is the joke about finding it online so it must be true. The joke works because people are generally suspicious at the content they find online. Of course, one cannot help but notice how these two popular expressions of this attitude toward the internet, when taken together, actually betray a confusion and ambivalence with regard to finding information online: are we too beholden to websites and search engines over more traditional means of research, or are we all pretty sure that online material isn’t really that reliable? It seems that we do not know.
Faith communities have particular cause to be concerned about maintaining traditional loci of authority given their already uncomfortable role as choices among many in a marketplace of truth crafted in the modern ideal of pluralism and voluntarism. Real problems arise here. For example, theologian Richard Gaillardetz was already noticing in 2000 the problems of independent “Catholic” websites: “The fact is that however much we may lament over the quality of theological conversation being conducted, it is an exchange being conducted beyond ecclesiastical control. No church office could possibly oversee and credential or approve every Web site that emerges with the word Catholic in its self-description.”21 This gives us insight as to why media and communications are of particular interest to the church. Though we may perceive the sheer number of new loci for “Catholic” information as a new problem, the church has always had to contend with sources of information and knowledge outside its control, which must have relied on some form of mediated communication, however rudimentary it appears to us now. It is at this point where the history of the printing press seems particularly helpful.
Reformation-era historians have long noted the relationship between the Reformers and the pamphlet and other forms of printed materials. Elizabeth Eisenstein takes the example of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses to illustrate the relationship. She argues that schism and debate existed long before Luther’s own list of grievances, but that “scribal campaigns had had a shorter wave resonance and produced more transitory effects. When implemented by print, divisions once traced were etched ever more deeply and could not be erased.”22 But in addition to providing the Reformers with a means of vast and efficient dissemination of antipapal materials, the printing press also afforded the church the ability to standardize its liturgy and practices. According to Eisenstein, “One may say that Catholic liturgy was standardized and fixed for the first time in a more or less permanent mold—at least one that held good for roughly four hundred years.”23 Thus while technology, specifically technologies which facilitate communications, has proven an integral part of the church’s evangelical mission. It has also been the occasion for debate and contention, some of which eventually led to councils whose pronouncements and creeds realign the body back to the truth of the church.24
The issue of authority persists in contemporary discussions of the relationship between magisterium and academic theologians. Anthony Godzieba argues that there is an important technological component to present debates over the hierarchy of truth and the authority of magisterial texts. He poses the following questions:
Does the immediate availability of a wide variety of papal statements via electronic media and the internet change the perceived level of authority that they carry? Even more fundamentally, does this “digital immediacy” influence the reception of these statements, which in turn shapes the statements’ truth-value and their influence on the development of the Roman Catholic tradition, the reality of communion, and the very character of “teaching authority”?25
His answer, in short, is yes: aesthetic differences between online and offline church documents has affected the perceived authority of the documents without regard for traditional levels on the hierarchy of truth within the Catholic Church. Godzieba uses an allocution by Pope John Paul II on assisted nutrition and hydration (ANH) as an example. According to Godzieba, “A one-off papal speech was viewed by some prominent ecclesiastics as a definitive settlement of a contested moral issue.”26 In the debates that ensued over ANH, especially during the case of Terri Schiavo in 2005, theologians attempted to explain how the papal allocution came to have such definitive status. On Godzieba’s view, one that was consistently overlooked was the technological.
For Godzieba, the issue was really “the immediate availability of papal and other official Vatican statements through various electronic media—what I am calling ‘digital immediacy’—and the precise determination of the form of that availability in our aestheticized culture, a culture saturated with images and constituted by a primacy of the visual.”27 His focus, then, is not as much on the content of the allocution but on its form, which is mediated to most of its readers in electronic form. “Digital immediacy” is the norm of the internet age, according to Godzieba, and “this norm bestows on any official statement an absoluteness.”28 The traditional levels of church teaching that allow theologians and others to negotiate particular texts within the Tradition become collapsed in the digital age. As Godzieba says, “Immediacy equals authenticity equals authority.”29
In the same volume in which Godzieba’s chapter appears, Vincent Miller extends the conversation over authority and the internet into the realm of consumer culture. With regard to Godzieba’s claims about the effects of “digital immediacy” on perceptions of magisterial teaching, Miller writes that this immediacy “does not simply free the papacy from the inertia of traditional media structures; it recontextualizes the pope as well.”30 Miller argues that instead of traditional “ecclesial structures” providing the “hermeneutics and pragmatics for interpreting and acting upon magisterial teaching,” consumer culture becomes the interpretive framework for such texts.31 The digital immediacy that Godzieba finds to be a centralizing force for the papacy, reinforcing and exacerbating “managerial” model over and against the communio, leaves it susceptible to commodification of religious traditions. Without the thick interpretive tradition which is skirted by such digital immediacy, the papal and magisterial texts that are Godzieba’s subject become loosed from their requisite hermeneutical mooring. What is lost, according to Miller, are “tradition-specific interpretive habits” and a connection to “shared community practices.”32
Miller goes on to argue that there are particular “cultural dynamisms” at work at the intersection of consumer culture and current communications technology. The first is heterogenization, an effect of globalization that “allows ever more differentiated communities to flourish.”33 With regard to consumerism, the effect of this for Miller is that it “renders social belonging increasingly a matter of choice.”34 Contemporary media ecology allows for and even encourages communities of choice, based on all kinds of common interests, ideologies, and common goals. “All they need to attract,” writes Miller, “is enough participants to maintain a conversation.”35
The second dynamism Miller names is deterritorialization, which he uses to describe the ability of “culture to float free” from the local community, as well as from the nation-state. Speaking elsewhere of deterritorialization, Miller writes, “Globalization arises from and encourages the proliferation of networks, organizations, and operations that escape and erode the national scale.”36 Communications technology is integral to this escape and erosion, which affects the imagination of local communities such as churches as well. This gets at the heart of Miller’s understanding of what the internet does: as the agent of deterritorialization (or perhaps AN agent, although it seems like the internet is the best example of this), “every group, no matter how much it may be in the demographic majority, can imagine itself a minority with no responsibility for their influence over the status quo.”37
The effect of both heterogenization and deterritorialization is an emphasis on identity. For the religiously inclined, the problem with identity is that “the complex hermeneutics and casuistry of living traditions with responsibility for putting their beliefs into practice do not fit well in this new identity-focused culture.”38 The effect of globalization—performed, perpetuated, and exacerbated by the internet—is to render magisterial authority inert as it lacks the hermeneutical hierarchical structures, mediated by the local community, necessary for their reception as anything other than another opinion—another consumerist choice among many.
In addition to these issues, theologians are also concerned—primarily as teachers and academics—with the changing loci of authority with regard to all knowledge. According to Bennett, “We cannot see distinctions between ourselves and God when ‘attaining knowledge’ has been truncated to the phrase ‘Let me just Google that.’”39 This inability to distinguish between ourselves and God, according to Bennett, should help us understand how to name the internet as one of the Powers and Principalities referenced by the New Testament. As a Power, Bennett argues, “the internet is one of many social structures which affects our ability to follow Jesus well.”40 Powers are created and therefore fallen.41 The fallenness of the internet is primarily in its ability, as a Power, to appear as what it is not. According to Bennett, “We humans are too prone to believing that we make institutions like the internet. But it is exactly in believing this that makes the Powers seem to have autonomy from God; thus they dominate and dehumanize humans by separating us, too, from God.”42 For Bennett, then, the way in which the internet inserts itself as an authority speaks directly to its being a Power, created and fallen, and ultimately set against the true authority of God.
Bennett, Miller, and Godzieba provide different theological perspectives on the relationship between the internet and authority. Bennett argues that as one of the Powers and Principalities, the internet sets up its own authority against the true authority of God, and presumably against truth and knowledge of which God is the source. Miller argues that the internet contributes to the commodification of religion by refocusing culture onto identity, thereby disrupting the traditional structures by which magisterial authority is interpreted. Godzieba argues that “digital immediacy” contributes to a centralization of ecclesial authority by flattening the hierarchy of truth by way of aesthetical form. Their perspectives highlight the dynamic relationship of the sites of authority to consumer culture, as well as the relationship between the church and the culture(s) in which it finds itself throughout history.43
The incarnational emphasis of these approaches with regard to authority is not as readily apparent as other aspects of the internet. In fact, the doctrine of the Incarnation offers a critical framework on this aspect only as it pertains to the doctrine of the church. In the discussions of authority above, the church provides the standard of organizational integrity and internal coherence, which it reflects only insofar as it is founded upon and sustained by Christ. An incarnational approach to the question of authority is one that understands the importance of mediating structures, the primary of which is the sacramental life of the church, lived out in local communities. The theological antidote to decentralized, unbounded knowledge proffered by the internet is the joining of oneself to a community with commonly held loci of authority given it by the author of life.
Access
The issue of authority in an online context is closely related to the issue of access. By “access,” I mean two distinct but related things. First, there is great concern over how easily we are able to access whatever we want online. Second, there is some concern about discrepancies in access between various groups of people. This is one of the most convincing theological concerns, as one who studies the internet cannot help but notice the degree to which it is centered on the experience of some in the world and ignores or excludes others. Political scientist Pippa Norris is a leading researcher on the so-called digital divide, which she divides into three types: global, social, and democratic.44 The global digital divide acknowledges differences in access between countries, correlated with differences in development generally. The social digital divide refers to the difference in access between rich and poor within a particular country. Finally, the democratic digital divide refers to differences in utilization of the internet among users.45
Bennett addresses the digital divide in its global form, saying, “Third-World peoples may end up feeling coerced by a world in which they cannot fully participate; colonialism emerges once again, this time in the guise of sleek machinery that promises to ‘connect us’ to a broader world, but in reality disconnects.”46 The problem of access in this respect falls mostly under the topic of development, deserving of a full theological treatment, and thus outside the scope of this project.
The other meaning of access is related Bennett’s discussion about attaining knowledge. Drawing on Graham Ward’s Cities of God, Bennett argues that knowledge and truth become “readily available to us in a variety of convenient interfaces that can be bought.”47 The argument rests in the assumption that the internet is primarily the place of search engines, the magical tools that bring to our eyes and minds whatever it is we call upon. Indeed, for Bennett, perhaps the search engine is best understood as the primary faculty by which the internet behaves as a Power, asserting itself as the locus of all knowledge, a poor substitution for the source of all true knowledge. The anxiety over access under this meaning appears in several other places, including Craig Detweiler’s iGods. According to Detweiler, “Our machines offer us more access and more computing speed at more affordable prices every day.”48 He assumes throughout his text that “we are inundated by too much information (of our own making).”49
Detweiler’s argument goes on to be about both information and material goods. With regard to information, his example is, understandably, Google. According to Detweiler, “Google is guided by an ambitious mission statement—organizing the world’s information.”50 Like Bennett, Detweiler turns to Genesis for his theological account of this phenomenon. “If the original temptation in the garden was too much knowledge,” he writes, “then Google is flirting with ancient lures. The hunger for knowledge can evidently overtake us, taking God out of the center of the world and thereby decentering us.”51
The worry is over the way in which online habits are forming us as individuals and members of communities. For example, Philip Thompson uses the contemplative project of Thomas Merton “to challenge a technological mentality which is seeking to solve problems at hyper-speed and is justified by the mandates of expediency and efficiency.”52 He recognizes this technological mentality within himself and calls the need to be connected constantly to devices, “compulsive communication anxiety.”53 According to Thompson, “It illustrates how communication technologies can overwhelm our consciousness through an unceasing info-glut that may limit our most important interactions with family and friends.”54 He goes on to list many alarming examples of the negative effects of our “information age”: statistics about daily average screentime, the demise of print culture, isolation and the erosion of traditional sites for necessary “social development,” the growing number of children and adolescents on psychotropic medications, diminished reading comprehension among younger children, general memory loss after prolonged internet use, lack of sleep due to devices, and more.55 The list is staggering (if tenuous in terms of causality). All of these problems lead Thompson to conclude, “This communication environment is not particularly hospitable to ancient truths and religious practices.”56
There is a connection here between access to goods and information, and access to other human beings. The internet affords its users great access to knowledge, but it also provides access to other people. This access to others can take more than one form. It can be friendly communication with strangers or friends, or it can be accessing photos or words of another person within various contexts, most of which they curate themselves. In the latter case, the person can be removed from the moment of access, either consciously or unconsciously. For example, I can access someone else’s thoughts through her blog. She need not be present for me to access her words.57
Here we see the theological concern over the pernicious effects of a technologized existence. Critics such as Thompson operate with the correct assumption that there is something disturbing about the way in which our time online conditions us not only to desire but to expect things and even people to be readily accessible when we demand them. To put it Bennett’s terms of the Powers and Principalities, “Technological life overtakes us and blinds us to the realities in which we live, leaving us powerless to think about how to be and act in the world.”58 Thus enters Miller’s concern over the emphasis on identity: we pick and choose our identity markers from the variety of choices to which we have (unprecedented) access online. The internet is a product of consumer mentality as well as a way to reinforce it.
Detweiler picks up this theme in his chapter on Amazon.com. His argument here is that Amazon’s voracious appetite to be the single purveyor of all goods perpetuates materialism and our insatiable desire for more and more stuff. His antidote appears to be something like a relational consumerism, wherein our economic behavior is structured not just by price and expediency but by relationships. He writes, “All that time spent online is a step away from human contact. . . . Products used to be created and distributed locally. We knew the cobbler, the tailor, the candlestick maker. . . Shopping became transactional and impersonal.”59 The practical effect of this for Detweiler is the way in which it forms contemporary perceptions of church communities. He argues that Amazon’s model of personalized shopping and consumer reviews (anyone is able to leave a review on a product on Amazon) has made its way into how people choose their church homes. Sites such as Yelp allow users to leave reviews of churches and other religious communities, turning communities into commodities.60
The theological antidotes to the “info-glut,” to use Thompson’s phrase, are varied. Thompson’s argument throughout his text is that Thomas Merton’s contemplative project provides much needed respite from the technologized society in which we live. He applies Merton’s reflections on the media of his own time, specifically as they related to advertising, to the technologies with which Thompson finds so many problems. He finds several facets of Merton’s own life appealing. First, we must reject the passive subjectivity which many media, especially television, require. Secondly, “we must redevelop our sense of community with neighbors, parishes, civic associations, clubs and families.”61 But the most important antidote to the technological mentality is to cultivate a contemplative prayer life. For Thompson, “The modern technological world and its communication forms have lost the best part of life, the access to a more profound vision that encompasses both temporal and spiritual realities.”62
Detweiler’s suggestion is related, though not as concretely argued. He concludes his work by championing a retreat into the wilderness, “As we hurtle down toward an unknown future with technology, we must plan some conscious pauses and be willing to use a mute button in our lives.”63 He also argues that the abundance of the Garden in Genesis 2 should give us pause, reminding us that true abundance is life with God and not in the “stuff” we fashion by ourselves.
Besides the emphasis on contemplative prayer and silence, two themes persist around this particular theological concern. The first theme is the ecclesiology of the local Christian community. The community functions as the Christian response to an online existence characterized by individualism, fragmentation, and reckless consumption of knowledge, goods, and other people. The Christian community provides the infrastructure and traditions for ways of life that can counter these pernicious behaviors. The second theme is implied in this emphasis on the local Christian community, and it concerns the category of the “real.”
Andrew Root frames the unmitigated access afforded by the internet in terms of the question of reality itself. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard, he writes, “Thanks to our screens, we live in an age where symbols and actualities are no longer necessarily connected, where life becomes about consuming images, about correlation to un-real (hyper-real) simulations of beauty, wealth, and celebrity.”64 Although not as explicit as Root, this distinction between the “real” and the not-real or not-as-real symbols and signs of the internet pervades theological discourse about the internet. After all, the salient point of Thompson’s cataloguing of culturally detrimental consequences of the internet is to demonstrate how we are being rent from reality itself. In both Root and Thompson, the antidote for the persistent attack on the real is to be rooted in the local community of the church. The church, they argue, offers the truly embodied experience of human life of which the internet can only be a simulacrum. Perhaps the most common evidence for this is the essentially disembodied reality of the internet, an aspect that causes great anxiety for theologians and to which we now turn.
Disembodiment
A common assumption is that when a person is online, her interactions with both content and other people lack “bodily-ness” in a way that offline life does not. This assumption is quickly followed by another, with a more critical edge: “embodied” interactions are more real and therefore better than disembodied ones, meaning that as necessarily “disembodied,” online interaction is less real than offline interaction.65 It is not difficult to see how theologians find cause for concern here, especially in a tradition where materiality and the body play such vital roles in the sacramental and liturgical life of the community.
This notion of disembodiment within online communication appears in both scholarly and popular commentary about the internet. The problem with the internet, we say, is that whatever social interaction takes place there cannot measure up to its offline counterpart precisely because our bodies are somehow not (as) involved. This sentiment appears in explicit or implicit form in nearly every critical account of the internet. It tends to rely on a more general assumption that technology draws people away from the “real,” and for theologians and other religiously minded people, being drawn away from the real is being effectively drawn away from source of the real: God.
The editors of America magazine provide a summary of the stakes here. They write, “[D]igital isolation will only grow more acute as technology progresses. Imagine being attached to your computer at all times, whether through your watch or your glasses. Genuine human encounters will only be more difficult in a society filled with digital barriers.”66 The editors’ use of the word “genuine” here is illustrative. I would argue that what they mean here is that embodied encounter unmediated by digital technology is more real than encounters that are.
This assumption runs so deep in critiques of the internet that it is often difficult to separate it from the many other concerns already discussed here. I would argue that disembodiment, by and large, undergirds most of the theological accounts of the internet, if not the nontheological as well. There is a common perception that the increase of the virtual means a decrease of embodied experiences. We are worried that the body will become less relevant to human life. Surely there are some who would argue that human evolution is moving in this direction. So-called “transhumanists” speak of an existence beyond the confines and obstacles of the physical body.67 This makes theologians (and probably many non-theologians) understandably nervous. The experience of the body is central to how we have thought about what it means to be human since the question was first posed. It is possible that the resistance to transhumanism is at the root of an explosion of scholarship on the “body” from all kinds of academic disciplines.
In reaction to these transhumanist impulses, there has been a tendency to assert the reality of embodied experience over disembodied ones. Therefore, perhaps the most common expression of this particular anxiety over disembodiment is in the real/virtual binary. We saw this in Andrew Root’s comments about symbols above. The internet, according to Root, has created a realm of the “hyper-real,” which competes with the reality toward which the Christian community is oriented. He writes, “To proclaim the gospel is to speak of the real—most fully, Jesus Christ. But this Christ who is incarnate and crucified can only be found in existence itself, in the realness and fullness of the human experience.”68 But Root never defines “the realness and fullness of the human experience,” presumably because he doesn’t think he has to. He simply assumes that his words signal, by necessity, a non-digital experience. This is simply what he means when he uses words like “real,” “full,” and “human.”
The effect of this is to separate anything that can be described as “virtual” from being described as “real.” What is important is the assumption that genuine or real relies upon a particular version of embodiment, namely that which we perceive to be unmediated. This creates a kind of hierarchy of encounters among the unmediated and the digitally mediated. Should this remain a binary, however, it misses so much of human activity: most of our encounters—with objects, with ideas, and with one another—are mediated by something. Language and text are some of the most fundamental that come to mind.
It is not enough, however, to acknowledge the necessary mediation of human encounter. We must also acknowledge that digitally mediated experiences are, in fact, embodied, although perhaps not in the way we mean as we describe it as “disembodied.” Pursuing this question of embodiment and online experiences tends to expose the assumptions we carry into discussions of the body. It requires a body to engage with technology. Furthermore, the various mediations of virtual space—photos, sound, text—require sense experiences.
According to Graham Ward, the changes wrought by telecommunications include changes to our conception of space itself. They also include changes in our perceptions of what society is, and, in turn, what the individual is. As predicated on relationships between individuals, society is built upon negotiating trust and doubt. He argues, “With advanced telecommunications, forms of trusting are not only divorced from face-to-face encounter but become founded upon texts, their composition, transmission, and interpretation.”69 Ward is reminiscent of Miller here, arguing that the imagined space has thus become “internationalized.” He writes, “The internationalism of space produces international persons who are more diffuse, less embodied, more experimental, and less identifiable.”70 He goes on to argue that this view of the individual, a view in which the disembodied nature of our age plays an integral part, “denigrates being local such that material ‘locatedness’ is not in vogue.”71
Thus we have the appearance of one of the theological antidotes to the disembodied realm of the internet: the primacy of the local church community (again). Ward describes the vanishing relevance of the local: “How can an act of local responsibility—being a member of a town council or a volunteer in a regional project for the homeless—escape the sense of being arbitrary or parochial?”72 One can easily add participation in a church community as “an act of local responsibility.” Indeed, he goes on to argue that it is now the church’s onus to reassert “the importance of local and particular embodiment and of local and particular relations” in light of the changing technological and social landscape.73
Ward also argues that the internet is specifically about the transmission of text. The internet, he argues, “aspires to the pure act of reading, in which the interface between reader and text dissolves.”74 This particular article was written in 2002, before the advent of many of the technologies to which this observation might apply. One need only think of GoogleGlass, a device that places the computer interface into eyeglasses so that as one looks outward to the offline world, one is also peering into the online world. We are moving closer and closer, then, to the disappearing interface of which Ward speaks here. For Ward, this movement is theological. He writes,
The dreams of fully realistic virtual realities—the kind advertised in Star Trek’s holodeck—signal a desire for new textual immediacies. The trajectory of this desire is eschatological. It is a contemporary refiguring, after the various Enlightenment refigurings, of the city of God: a techno-redemption. The euphoria of certain apologists for cyberspace is an expression of a yearning for infinite freedom conceived as infinite light.75
The transhumanist impulse to free oneself from the body—to whatever degree it is present in current iterations of online life—is problematic for theologians for several reasons. In addition to the first theological locus of the church, which necessitates a being-together in physical space, a second theological locus emerges here: the Incarnation. The central conviction of the Christian church is that God takes flesh in Jesus Christ, a conviction that influences the Christian perspective on materiality’s place in the economy of grace. Thirdly, following from the Incarnation, is the resurrection, both of Jesus Christ and of ourselves. As Graham Ward puts it, “After all, resurrection is resurrection of the body.”76 Theologians have long seen it significant that the risen Christ is risen not in some ethereal, nonphysical form, but in a body, able to be touched by his disciples.
In order to argue for the internet as one of the Powers and Principalities, Bennett argues against the prevailing idea that the internet is primarily a disembodied space. She writes, “It is a body that must use the computer, check the email, navigate the avatar, reflect on how to interact with these people online.”77 But she, and any other theologian, must admit the importance of the local embodied community, especially for the sacramental life of the church. She writes, “The internet is not likely to be a proper site for participating in the sacraments or other physical forms of materiality that signify God’s grace.”78 The centrality of the sacraments and the “other physical forms of materiality” which participate in the sacramental order give a rather unavoidable preference to the local church. The centrality of this physically bounded community is incarnational; God’s revelation in the person of Jesus Christ changes the way in which Christians see the entirety of the created order. Therefore, both the local church (in its administration of the sacraments) and the Incarnation function as the two main theological loci for theological discussion of disembodiment in virtual life.
Conclusion: A Way Forward
Different Christian traditions have negotiated the place of “other physical forms of materiality that signify God’s grace” differently. The focus of the next chapter will be the Catholic tradition’s insistence upon physical objects and places in the sacramental order by virtue of an incarnational approach to the world.
I have attempted to describe several aspects of the internet that have been of particular concern to theologians. These five aspects are intimately related and often overlapping, and they often appear in nontheological approaches to the internet as well. In short, theologians have relied both implicitly and explicitly on two doctrinal loci to address the concerns of virtual life: the church, specifically in its local form, and the Incarnation. For my part, I am convinced that these are indeed the two most relevant doctrinal loci for analyzing our current technological moment. What I propose, however, is an approach to the internet which attempts to understand its most basic logic, virtuality, as an expansive category that can actually help modern people understand some of the most important aspects of the Catholic imagination.
At the heart of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the church is a necessary dialectic between presence and absence, a dialectic upon which both interpersonal communication and mediation rely in virtual space. Although I will not return precisely to these five aspects of the internet, together they describe the “virtual” and in some cases are integrally important to religious modes of thought that sustain the life of the church and the Catholic imagination in particular.
The very category of “virtual” under which exists all of the activity and content theologians have found to be interesting and troubling is a constitutive part of the sacramental and ecclesial theology of the Catholic tradition. By focusing on what we mean by “virtual” in different contexts, I argue that we can come to see mediation as more than just a function of the internet. Mediation is, in a sense, the very practice that sustains the sacramental imagination. The church needs a “virtual logic” in order to understand both the sacraments and all of the physical-material entities which participate in the larger sacramentality of creation itself. In addition, in order for the church to be understood fully in both its universal and local iterations, one needs both presence and absence. This church has its own virtuality at the heart of its self-understanding as transcendent of both space and time.
Such virtuality necessarily entails attributes such as disembodiment and anonymity, and the necessity of these modes of social interaction and religiosity in the church should alert us to the fact that much of what is making theologians uncomfortable or worried about the internet is not about the form of mediation but in its referent. It is virtual space cultivated not for a community oriented toward God but often oriented toward themselves. While much attention has been given to mediation itself, I propose we instead focus on what or whom is being mediated and to what end. We have begun our theological discourse about the internet by focusing on its form and assuming that its mediating logic is necessarily antithetical to the sacramental and ecclesial convictions of the church. I contend, however, that we must expand our understanding of “virtual,” using it as a hermeneutic for the church’s long history of mediation. This will enable us to return to the internet with a more productive and honest theological evaluation.
NOTES
1. The technologically adept will be quick to point out that it is possible to discover someone’s identity through IP addresses or extensive research.
2. See Hua Qian and Craig R. Scott, “Anonymity and Self-Disclosure On Weblogs,” Journal of Computer Mediated-Communication 12, no. 4 (July 2007): 1428–1451; Erin E. Hollenbaugh and Marcia K. Everett, “The Effects of Anonymity On Self-Disclosure in Blogs: An Application of the Online Disinhibition Effect,” Journal of Computer Mediated-Communication 18, no. 3 (April 2013): 283–302.
3. Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 8.
4. Here one could point to alarming accounts of “virtual” rape through avatars in games, for example.
5. Quoted in Jana Marguerite Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? Doing Theology in an Internet Age (New York: T & T Clark, 2012), 57.
6. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web?
7. George Randels, “Cyberspace and Christian Ethics: The Virtuous and/in/of the Virtual,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 20 (2008): 165.
8. Randels, “Cyberspace and Christian Ethics,” 167.
9. Ibid., 169.
10. Ibid.
11. Rob Haskell, “eVangelism: The Gospel and the World of the Internet,” Evangelical Review of Theology 34, no. 3 (2010): 280.
12. The sacredness of God’s name in the Jewish tradition contributes to this desire for namefulness as well. The God of Israel is particular and personal, although in Christ, the ineffable God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—described in terms of the people whom He has chosen—takes on a name so as to take on humanity. The veil of the sanctuary rips in two, no longer dividing those who can speak God’s name and those who cannot.
13. Adam Copeland, “The Ten Commandments 2.0,” Word & World 32, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 218.
14. Copeland, “The Ten Commandments 2.0,” 220.
15. National Public Radio has become the latest organization to struggle with online comments. In 2016, they published an article with the following statement: “After much experimentation and discussion, we’ve concluded that the comment sections on NPR.org stories are not providing a useful experience for the vast majority of our users.” Scott Montgomery, “Beyond Comments: Finding Better Ways To Connect With You,” NPR.org (August 17, 2016).
16. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 145.
17. Ibid., 71.
18. Ibid., 147.
19. Ibid., 151.
20. I return to the issue of vitriol when discussing Pope Francis’ 2017 and 2018 Communications Day addresses.
21. Richard R. Gaillardetz, “The New E-Magisterium,” America 182, no. 16 (May 6, 2000): 9.
22. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge, 1983), 151–152.
23. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 153.
24. Although the Reformation provides a clear example of the role of media in the church, earlier examples exist. Even as early as 325 CE, the positions of Arius at the Council of Nicaea and others involved in the Christological controversies were mediated by means of sermons, a kind of early “mass medium.”
25. Anthony Godzieba, “Quaestio Disputata: The Magisterium in an Age of Digital Reproduction,” in When the Magisterium Intervenes: The Magisterium and Theologians in Today’s Church, ed. Richard Gaillardetz (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 140. Godzieba’s worries here could easily be placed under “Access” below as well. At the heart of his concern, however, are the ways in which the internet affects perceptions of authority.
26. Ibid., 143–144.
27. Ibid., 146.
28. Ibid., 147.
29. Ibid. There are related concerns in other ecclesial contexts over communities or individuals online who are promulgating noncanonical texts as Sacred Scripture. Michael Legaspi argues that the shift from understanding the Bible as Scripture to understanding it as “text” can be understood as a shift to “opacity.” The reformers “contributed to what I have called scriptural opacity, with the authority, meaning, and location of the Bible all becoming contested questions” (Legaspi 25). The fixed type of the printing press is clearly an important factor in this opacity reliant on the fixity of the text. In the digital age, however, text has, in some ways, regained its transparency. Text can be altered with a few key strokes, ideas, and images deleted and added at will. It should come as no surprise, then, that there is a small but real consideration of the canon from communities who have been established on the very opacity of the text itself. Our interactions with technology may have affected our views of text itself, including the central text of Christian communities.
30. Vincent Miller, “When Mediating Structures Change: The Magisterium, the Media, and the Culture Wars,” in When the Magisterium Intervenes: The Magisterium and Theologians in Today’s Church, ed. Richard Gaillardetz (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 157.
31. Miller, “When Mediating Structures Change.”
32. Ibid., 159.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 162.
35. Ibid.
36. Vincent Miller, “Media Constructions of Space, the Disciplining of Religious Traditions, and the Hidden Threat of the Post-Secular,” in At the Limits of the Secular: Reflections on Faith and Public Life, ed. William A. Barbieri, Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 178–179.
37. Miller, “When Mediating Structures Intervene,” 164.
38. Ibid., 165.
39. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 47.
40. Ibid., 103.
41. Col. 1:16–17.
42. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 105.
43. As George Randels writes, “This technology may require the church to reinterpret itself and its sources, re-emphasize or de-emphasize parts of its tradition, or adopt new points of view, even as the church also influences the use of computer technology.”
44. Pippa Norris, Digital Divide? Civic Engagement, Information Poverty and the Internet in the Democratic Societies (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4.
45. Norris, Digital Divide? 5. Theologians have begun to deal with the first two kinds of divide, but have been largely silent on the third.
46. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 18.
47. Ibid.
48. Craig Detweiler, iGods: How Technology Shapes Our Spiritual and Social Lives (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2013), 15.
49. Detweiler, iGods.
50. Ibid., 115.
51. Ibid.
52. Phillip M. Thompson, Returning to Reality: Thomas Merton’s Wisdom for a Technological World (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2012), xx.
53. Thompson, Returning to Reality, 36.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 39.
56. Ibid., 46.
57. Access in this way also applies to the various unsavory aspects of the internet, such as pornography or erotic literature.
58. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 105.
59. Detweiler, iGods, 89.
60. Ibid., 92.
61. Thompson, Returning to Reality, 48.
62. Ibid., 50.
63. Detweiler, iGods, 219. But Detweiler parts ways with Thompson in offering as his final reflection the image of the city as a crucial aspect of the eschatological vision.
64. Andrew Root, “A Screen-Based World: Finding the Real in the Hyper-Real,” Word & World 32, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 241.
65. I will assume, for the purposes of reviewing this literature, that online interaction is “disembodied.” Later, I argue that the category is complicated, if not ultimately unhelpful.
66. “Our Digital Future,” Editorial, America (February 17, 2014), accessed online, http://americamagazine.org/issue/our-digital-future.
67. One of the most well-known authors on transhumanism is Ray Kurzweil, who proposed singularity as humankind’s telos in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
68. Root, “A Screen-Based World,” 242.
69. Graham Ward, “Between Virtue and Virtuality,” Theology Today 59, no. 1 (2002): 58. I find the use of “face-to-face” to be more specific and more helpful than “disembodied,” though it too has problems.
70. Ibid., 59.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 61.
73. Ibid., 62.
74. Ibid., 64.
75. Ibid., 65. Here Ward is drawing on Sean Cubitt’s Digital Aesthetics (London: Sage Publications, 1998).
76. Ibid.
77. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 79.
78. Ibid., 49.
