Internet

The phenomenon known as globalization is made possible by advances in technology, communication, and information services. Perhaps the most important of these developments is the Internet, which began as a small network of computers in the late 1960s and rapidly expanded into a global communications network, which links not only computers but an ever-expanding number of electronic instruments. The Internet was first used primarily for military purposes, but its use soon expanded throughout the professional world and then into the privacy of homes, cell phones, and increasingly minute and mobile devices. As the Internet has colonized the daily lives of individuals, so have the concerns of individuals colonized the Internet. Although the dispersed, amorphous, and virtual character of the Internet makes it difficult to quantify, all indicators show that religion has a tremendous presence online. What this means is another question, as the Internet offers both opportunities and challenges to individuals and their religious traditions.

By most accounts, there are millions of Internet pages devoted to religious content, and evidence suggests that use of the Internet for religious purposes concentrates around the communication of information about events happening offline. At this level, the Internet acts as a fairly traditional medium, which reproduces the “real” in a symbolic medium, with the difference that communication is nearly instantaneous and relatively decentralized. Websites devoted to communicating information include the following types of sites: community hubs hosted by particular congregations (e.g., the website of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives at http://www.obcon.org); establishment hubs organized by the governing body of a tradition (see the Vatican's site at http://www.vatican.va); multipurpose portals offering a sampling of educational materials, chat rooms, commerce, media, and other tools (e.g., http://crosswalk.com); evangelical sites (True Jesus Church at http://www.tjc.org and [Page 568]http://www.outreachjudaism.org); international religious-based NGOs addressing world hunger (http://www.bread.org); commemorative sites (http://www.virtual-memorials.com); and myriad others. The sites listed here are only a minute sampling of a vast range of material online, and as the examples suggest, the Internet is host to a multiplicity of religious traditions and religious-inspired causes as well as their critics.

In addition to communication venues, the Internet provides unique opportunities for technology-assisted interaction, whether individually or in groups. One of the more interesting adaptations of the Internet's potential for interactivity is online ritual. The first online ritual was a memorial service for the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Challenger in 1986, and currently, users can participate in individual and group rituals at will. Users can enter virtual temples online, download meditative sound files, view images of a god or icon, and make credit card offerings to communities of their choice. Users can organize and attend funerals online, perform weddings (albeit with dubious legal consequences), offer prayers, stream real-time religious services, burn virtual incense, visit memorial sites, and even perform virtual sacrifices at spoof sites. Scholars are divided as to how these and other adaptations affect religious experience, however. Early studies of religion online were alternatively utopian and dystopian about the ways in which the Internet would transform religious experience, but a second generation of scholarship argues that religious ritual merely recreates offline life. This “doubling” effect generates questions about the reality of virtuality, but such questions are misleading. The real and the virtual are difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish, and they often have feedback effects on each other. More tractable questions about the nature of religion online concern how the Internet affects authority structures, identity formation, and the structure of sacred time and space.

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