ABSTRACT
Technological millenarians have been prophesizing the salvation of humanity through the computational powers of those little electronic boxes on our desks for some time now (Kurzweil 1999). There are many compelling arguments to be made about the benefits and detriments of religious life in the digital age, and a major study titled Faith Online, conducted in 2003 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, engages many of the seminal issues at stake here: Will people use the internet to pursue spiritual avenues that are outside the mainstream, leading to new forms of religious expression? Will the internet usher in a new Reformation, as did the printing press 500 years ago? Will the instantaneous and surface-level nature of much of the content on the World Wide Web impede truly deep contemplation? The Pew study reveals that at least 64 per cent of American internet-users employ the internet for overtly religious or spiritual matters, such as learning about holidays, sending email with religious or spiritual content, and seeking information on where to attend religious services (Clark et al. 2004). All indications are that this number has grown since the report was released in 2004, making it imperative that we attempt to understand the ways that religious ideas and behaviors are influenced by this new medium. This chapter, however, does not aim to chronicle the many specifically religious websites that are used by the faithful to participate in their religion. Rather, it examines one particular area of the internet that is not overtly religious, yet fulfills many of the functions commonly associated with religion, while also affecting the spiritual life of users. The area to which I am referring is the “social Web,” the collection of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster; bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Stumble Upon; messaging utilities such as Twitter; social knowledge bases such as Wikipedia; publishing tools such as blogs; and other such applications that are all designed to foster multiple levels of interaction among users, who are encouraged to post a profile and share ideas, pictures, comments, and messages in an effort to create collaborative worlds of meaning. These social features of the internet give rise to a number of functions that
are fundamental to most successful religions. There are many ways to view
religion, as the contributions to this volume amply attest, and for the purposes of this chapter, following Mun-Cho Kim (who carried out early work on religion and the internet), I will focus on how the social Web satisfies three main functions of religion: interpretation, interaction, and integration. The interpretive function, Kim argues, “has to do with the ability of religion to provide meaningful answers to ultimate and eternal questions about human existence,” while the interactive function “has to do with the ability of religious organizations to provide opportunities for some people to associate with others with whom they can exchange ideas, benefits, lifestyles, tastes, and so forth.” He suggests that all people are looking for “friendship, companionship, acceptance, and recognition,” and that, for “some people in modern society,” belonging to a religious community “provides a sense of community making it easier to cope with either loneliness or isolation” (Kim 2005, 140-41). As for the integrative function, sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that religion is integrative because it involves “beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim 1963, 47). Once we establish the way the social Web affords these functions, we can
then explore the expansive effects wrought by this domain on the consciousness of frequent users. My own computerized analysis of almost three million user profiles from a variety of social networks suggests that these networks tend to promote a decentered view of the self that is in harmony with the deepest insights of Buddhism. Scholars have debated intensely the notion that different forms of communication technologies, from writing through the printing press to mass media, produce a bias toward different religious ideas; here we extend that discussion to the social Web.1
