• Technology, ethics and religious language: early Anglophone Christian reactions to “cyberspace”

    Author(s):
    Peter Webster (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    British History, Digital Humanists
    Subject(s):
    Internet, History, Religions, Secularization, Cyberspace, Sociology, Civilization, Modern, Technology
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    language and religion, internet ethics, Web history, 1990s, Internet history, Religious history, Sociology of cyberspace, Technologies of modernity
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/zcka-yx96
    Abstract:
    The very recent past has seen an upswing of scholarly interest not so much in the Internet and Web themselves but in the terms in which they have been discussed and understood. This article examines a remarkable effusion of writing in the 1990s that addressed the spiritual and ethical implications of “cyberspace”. Christian critics reacted in different ways to prophecies of technological revolution. Some saw ethical challenges in relation to economic and social exclusion and the nature of interpersonal relations. Others elaborated a semi-mystical evolutionary understanding of the Web as an ontologically concrete “space”. Others again revived older anxieties about the challenge apparently posed to human uniqueness and autonomy posed by computerisation more generally, which cyberspace threatened to magnify. However, this thinking did not occur in isolation from the sweep of Anglophone social thought. I suggest instead that the wider discourse about the ethics of the Internet and Web, both learned and popular, was infused at every level with religious imagery. As such, the article contributes to the ongoing debate on the extent to which the cultures of the UK and North America have been secularised: even if religious observance has declined, the English language still bears the marks of its Christian past.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1080/24701475.2018.1468976
    Publisher:
    Informa UK Limited
    Pub. Date:
    2018-5-5
    Journal:
    Internet Histories
    Volume:
    2
    Issue:
    3-4
    Page Range:
    299 - 314
    ISSN:
    2470-1475,2470-1483
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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