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Whenever I come across new prognostications about how the Internet, cyberspace, or virtual reality will bring about either a new age of prosperity, or a millennium of evil and despair, I enjoy reaching for a favorite book, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation (Pantheon, 1984).

A joint project of The Nation magazine and the Institute of Expertology, this book has a chapter on Homo Faber (Man the toolmaker) and the unstoppable march of technology, including such gems as these:

• "I think there is a world market for about five computers," a remark made in 1943, attributed to Thomas J. Watson, the late chairman of ibm.
• "[A] few decades hence, energy may be free—just like the unmetered air," John von Neumann, the Fermi Award-winning mathematician and cofounder of game theory, in 1956.
• "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home," Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977.

The technoprophecies of the 1990s, often either deeply pessimistic or blithely utopian, view the development of cyberspace as if it were a newly discovered continent, full of delights to be exploited and dangers to be sidestepped.

In much the same way as explorers of an earlier era did, the cybernauts of this new world, courtesy of more than 120 million computers linked worldwide, are bringing all the great religions of the world along with them. Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and thousands of other religious groups have staked out territory in cyberspace. For the uninitiated Christian, the Christian Cyberspace Companion, by Jason Baker, furnishes an excellent introduction to the Internet and provides a valuable appendix of key religion resources.

Now that religion and the cyberfaithful are online, what do they aim to accomplish? How is cyberspace changing the rules and practice of religion? What are the tradeoffs?

Answering such questions is dependent on understanding as best we can how the Internet is altering our environment for better and worse. The experts and explorers may often be wrong in their predictions—not only because the pace of technological development is so rapid, but also because it is a remarkably human process, subject to unpredictable twists and turns.

An insightful commentary on cyber-pathologies, Virtual Gods, edited by Tal Brooke, in part advances a critique of the Internet through citing ideas from scholar and social critic Jacques Ellul: that technological progress "has its price," that it raises more and greater problems than it solves, that technology's benefits are inseparable from its destructive effects, and that every major technological innovation leads to many unforeseen consequences.

While we need these cautions against an uncritical faith in "progress," there is a difference between healthy skepticism and a demonizing of technology. A reader of Virtual Gods may be left with the impression that the use of technology is invariably a Faustian bargain, that it inevitably dehumanizes us and ultimately costs us our souls.

Certainly no human contraption, high-tech, low-tech, or no-tech, should ever be called neutral or impartial. In this decade, the Internet has repositioned itself at least three times, going from a strategic defense program, to the university, and finally to the open commercial marketplace on a worldwide scale. If you look in detail at how the Internet has developed, its technology has progressed to give its users a competitive advantage. Commercial junk e-mail, for example, was a nonexistent problem two years ago. Today it has become a huge issue for anyone with an e-mail address. It's a new way of selling goods and services, giving vendors a leg up on their competition.

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