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Among religions, a competitive advantage is pursued vigorously—if not for converts, then for public opinion and recognition. Although technophiles who embrace the Internet proclaim how it makes us better, I most often observe how little cyberspace has altered our behavior or core identities in any fundamental way. Jeff Zaleski's The Soul of Cyberspace chronicles how Sufi mystics, Roman Catholics, Lubavitchers, and other religious groups function online. They use the World Wide Web and other Internet areas to display an electronic self-portrait.
But what durable value is there in being online? Internet technology accelerates the rate of cultural change, intensifies new opportunities, and leverages one's grasp to global proportions. Computer technology allows us to do things faster, cheaper, and with greater precision. But for some, that is not enough. Author Zaleski's persistent question on whether prana, the Hindu term for life force, is transmittable via computers suggests that the supreme achievement for technology would be a computer achieving humanlike consciousness.
INTERNET AS RELIGIONA handful of leading postmodernists, New Agers, cyber-utopians, and others aspire to a future in which the Internet would function as a godlike force: omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.
While most of us consider computers as nifty tools to help us do our jobs better, this emerging movement has goals that seem straight out of a Star Trek episode:
- Developing computer systems to accept an upload of a dying individual's intelligence and personality.
- Creating a worldwide-linked computer system that would operate as a global mind.
- Reproducing computer-generated virtual realities that would operate with the same legitimacy as everyday reality.
If you set aside the scientific improbability of achieving such goals, these aspirations reveal a deeply spiritual agenda. When technology functions as a religion, as savior and liberator, we begin to project divine attributes onto it. We long for a way to take the sting out of death, for a connection to something larger and wiser than ourselves, and for a way to control and change our environments at will.
These desires expose the great risk of overreliance on technological solutions to the exclusion of other means. The force and power of technological progress has a multiplying, accumulating effect to the point where it may become the dominant influence on our lives. And within such dominance lies its natural limitations. Less than 10 years after the beginning of widespread availablity of Internet access, there are books on infoglut, cyberaddictions, and other maladjustments.
In The Soul in Cyberspace, Douglas Groothuis, assistant professor of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary, probes the extremist fringe of cyberideology from an evangelical perspective. A wild assortment of radical libertarians, antihumanist philosophers, and others with diverse and often contradictory agendas have seen in this new technology the fulfillment of their dreams. The Internet, true to its malleable character, becomes putty in their ideological hands. You would be hard-pressed to find a more alarming yet responsible survey of the 'Net's dark side than Groothuis's book.
There is ample reason for these concerns. The impact of pornography, for example, has been dramatically increased by the Internet. A recent newspaper article about the World Wide Web was headlined "News and Nudes." It detailed how the Wall Street Journal and Playboy magazine are among the few organizations well positioned to make a profit on the Web.
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