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Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.10.2.0301

2161-2196

Philip L. Frana,

Media, Religion, Digital Communication

The impact of high technology has been felt everywhere in society, luminously enacting the deepest expressions of the human imagination. From its origins fifty years ago, the history and theology of religion and technology has witnessed an explosion of work by academics such as Langdon Gilkey, Ian Barbour, and David Noble, and a more recent and even larger eruption in scholarship on the history and philosophy of religion and computing. The editors of Believing in Bits, Simone Natale and D. W. Pasulka, join this growing body of work by arguing that “religious beliefs and practices are inextricably linked to the functioning of digital media” (3). In their collection, seventeen scholars share perspectives from a variety of humanities and social-science disciplines and cross-disciplinary specializations. The chapters are loosely organized into three parts: “Archaeologies of the Digital Supernatural,” “Believing in Digital Worlds,” and “Spiritual Relationships between Technology and Humans.” Using the combined lenses of media archaeology and digital-media studies, the authors present original approaches to the examination of religious beliefs in new media.Natale and Pasulka point out in their introduction that global producers and consumers, confronted by Internet connectivity, advanced robotics, AI, automation, and big data, are influencing human choices about who or what to trust. They reference an assortment of important moments in the history of expert systems and machine learning. Some of these moments include Alan Turing's proposal of a test to determine whether a computer can think like a human being, the coding of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA chatbot, and Hans Moravec and Dmitry Itskov's separate plans to upload human minds into an artificial substrate. These inventions affect day-to-day “belief in technical systems,” and support interactions between faith and computing (and mechanical contraptions generally) within larger belief systems (4). So temporal is this faith, the authors argue, that contemporary societies are comfortable thinking of advanced technologies as spiritual mediums for deliverance or as magical, animated, and alive.Natale deploys media researcher Taina Bucher's concept of the “algorithmic imaginary” in the opening essay, “Amazon Can Read Your Mind: A Media Archaeology of the Algorithmic Imaginary” (8). Bucher is well known in new media and society circles for scrutinizing the commonplace influences and manipulations of algorithm-driven Facebook experiences. The effects flow in both directions: algorithms drive the feeds we follow, and we form impressions about how they work (or do not work). These experiences also help us to make sense of algorithms and form judgments about them. One of the uncanny (or creepy) outcomes of modern ontological and epistemological debates about algorithms is the feeling that algorithmic systems are clairvoyant. Natale explains that this is not a new phenomenon, as mid-twentieth century students of cybernetics recognized the “concept of mindreading in reference to computation” (20). David Hagelbarger's SEER (Sequence Extrapolating Robot) built in the 1950s at Bell Labs, for example, appeared able to predict the sequence of human actions in the game of matching pennies. Matching pennies is the classic example of a zero-sum game, but because human-produced sequences tend to be nonrandom, SEER quickly becomes an outguessing machine. A more recent mindreading machine is Amazon's anticipatory shipping, which predicts what consumables to automatically deliver to customers by inspecting troves of archived purchasing data.Anthony Enns' “Information Theory of the Soul: Spiritualism, Technology, and Science Fiction” (chapter 2) explores the notion of “human identity as informational patterns” (39). Enns points out that ghosts, avatars, and AI are technological soulmates today, much in the way that neurology and spiritualism were medical bedfellows in the nineteenth century. A similar point is made in chapter 3, “The Mediumship of the Digital: Sound Recording, Supernatural Inquiry, and the Digital Afterlife of Phonography” by Simone Dotto, which traces the switch from analog to digital capture of electronic-voice phenomena and foregrounding of digital technology and nostalgic memory in the computer-inspired musical microgenre known as sonic hauntology.This pattern-identity concept fits nicely within the practice of magic involving necromancy, in particular the summoning of visions, discovery of hidden knowledge, and enlivening of inanimates. The cyberneticist Norbert Wiener wrote in God and Golem (1964) that “[i]f machines are capable of creating other machines, then nonliving systems effectively possess the same creative power as God” (40). Moravec, a roboticist, contended that reducing people to “information packets” could make death “virtually meaningless” (41). The Heaven's Gate computer cult repackaged (with Java, C++, and Visual Basic) the age-old concept of the sacred sky as comet, UFO, and suicidal shedding of corporeal “containers.” Pattern theory of the self, self-reproducing automata, and cyborg cultists are all manifestations of secular faith in technical and digital-media systems.Rose Rowson's chapter, “Repost or Die: Ritual Magic and User-Generated Deities on Instagram” (chapter 5), is inspired by social-media deities such as Paul the Ball, Protection Puppy, and Watch Out Wolf, and especially the online sanctuary that invokes Safety Kitty and the “ritual use of hashtags” (100) to repel dark media such as creepypasta (copy-pasted horror tales), unpleasant reposts, and threatening chain email. Rowson connects these supernatural defenses against malevolent digital media to late twentieth-century descriptions of programmers as heavy wizards waving dead chickens against folk-devil hackers.Web 2.0 religious expressions are the subjects of “Instant Karma and Internet Karma: Karmic Memes and Morality on Social Media” by Beverley McGuire (chapter 6) and “Disciples of the New Digital Religions: Or, How to Make Your ‘Fake’ Religion Real” by Ken Chitwood (chapter 7). McGuire explores instant-karma memes and asks us to consider whether the Asian principles of action and reaction that are present in Hindu, Buddhist, and Shinto religions are well expressed in Internet cultures. “One must move offline,” McGuire concludes, “to encompass the full scope of karma” (121–22). Chitwood's subject is so-called parody and hyper-real religions, in particular the Disciples of the New Dawn (DOTND), a genuine but abstruse mock religion present on Facebook. DOTND posters have never admitted that it is a parody (perhaps of fundamentalism). Chitwood uses the group's online messages to illuminate greater dilemmas of power and legitimacy in postmodern religious belief.Chapter 9, “Plurality through Imagination: The Emergence of Online Tulpa Communities in the Making of New Identities,” by Christopher Laursen, is among the most fascinating essays in the volume. In ancient Buddhist texts, tulpas are magical creatures that enter the material world. The modern tulpa remains a mental construct, willed into a kind of sentient and autonomous existence by a human host who disclaims power over that which has been created. In this respect, a tulpa is not simply a homunculus or imaginary friend. Online communities of individuals known as tulpamancers create these magical mind-made creatures for various reasons, among them the management of loneliness and social anxiety.The volume's final contribution is Betti Marenko's “Algorithm Magic: Gilbert Simondon and Techno-Animism,” which meaningfully recapitulates some of the editors' conclusions. Algorithms are “magical utterances” that “perform in increasingly inscrutable ways, their agency no longer graspable by human cognition” (213). Marenko approaches this idea through the work of continental philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who put forward a theory of the rupture of the natural magical mode of human existence by technicity, where objects, tools, and instruments reveal a new human reality of ambiguity, anonymity, and alienation. Marenko argues that because “incomputability and uncertainty are now found at the very core of computation,” this rupture is collapsing into techno- or digital-animistic sensibilities (213).The afterword, a dialogue between Carole M. Cusack (a historian of religion), Massimo Leone (a semiologist), and Jeffrey Sconce (a film- and media-studies scholar), is intended as a “map of potential trajectories” for future research in religious and digital imaginaries, but it does not easily adhere to themes present in the rest of the volume. In one part of the discussion, Cusack agrees with Margaret Wertheim's conclusion in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (1999) that the infobahn, heaven, and hell “are all just narrative worlds that humans have invented” (234). But this begs a very important question: Would not a full discussion of the preternatural require a more direct discussion of the underworld and black magic? Like angels and code, the devil is often hidden from view.Because Believing in Bits is composed of evocative vignettes and esoteric examples, it is not always clear how these building blocks come together to form a new and cohesive discourse. Indeed, this could have been a much larger collection, as so many media-archaeological layers remain unexplored. Vincenzo Idone Cassone and Mattia Thibault's “I Play, Therefore I Believe: Religio and Faith in Digital Games” (chapter 4) and Joshua Mann's “Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion: Recent Developments and Their Significance” (chapter 11) are, respectively, descriptive surveys of religious themes in video games and the faith formation tools of augmented/virtual reality, but other forms of interactive digital media remain untouched. Affective computing and gamification (ludification) are mentioned only in passing, and other electronic media and virtual artifacts should be explored: software, wetware, digital afterlives, and fanfiction among them. The current volume is thus most useful as a supplement to the edited collections Religion and Cyberspace (edited by Morten Højsgaard and Margit Warburg, 2005), Digital Religion, Social Media, and Culture (edited by Pauline Hope Cheong, Peter Fischer-Nielsen, Stefan Gelfgren, and Charles Ess, 2012), and the numerous works of Heidi Campbell, including When Religion Meets New Media (2010) and (Campbell as editor) Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (2013).