Techno-Sapiens in a Networked Era: Becoming Digital Neighbors

By Cascade Books

Techno-Sapiens gathers together leading scholars of technology, theology, and religion in order to explore the ways in which modern technology is neither solely a dehumanizing force in the world nor a mere instrument for evangelizing the world, but rather the very means by which incarnation happens--the media in and through which humans love the (digital) other. The essays explore the question of how technology encourages and/or inhibits the human capacity to love our neighbor through asking the following questions: Who is my (digital) neighbor? How does social media in particular allow us to love our (digital) neighbor? How does one become a (digital) neighbor?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781725280540

Book preview

Introduction

Won’t You Be My (Digital) Neighbor?

Ryan K. Bolger & Kutter Callaway

The increasingly rapid pace at which modern technology continues to develop and proliferate has fundamentally reshaped the whole of human life, perhaps nowhere more so than in the domain of religion. Indeed, the need for a robust and constructive response to the transformative effects of technology is now more urgent than ever. On the one hand, emerging technologies have the capacity to expose otherwise disconnected individuals and communities to a rich diversity of religious expressions across the globe, providing unparalleled access to the cultural and religious other and, by extension, serving as potential mechanisms for empathetic engagement and understanding. On the other hand, the psychological, commercial, and even algorithmic structures of these technologies not only create the conditions for, but also actively promote various forms of solipsism, partisan rancor, and radicalization almost exclusively along ideological lines. Neither the math nor the moneyed interests care about how we treat our neighbors in the digital world or whether our portrayals of them are remotely accurate, just so long as we keep liking that which reinforces our preconceived assumptions and sharing our fear-based outrage with like-minded friends.

In this kind of technologically mediated context—one in which impressions and engagements are the most valuable commodities—how might Christians be and become neighbors in ways that leverage the potential of modern technology while also countering its destructive tendencies? This introductory chapter will raise these questions by describing the contemporary era in which this theme has become important and, in doing so, will provide historical and missiological context. It will also seek to introduce the various chapters and, insofar as possible, integrate the argument that emerges.

The Media Is the Mission

Fifty years ago, innovations and convergences in technology created the elements of what would become a networked global society. Innovations included the Arpanet developed by the US in 1969, designed with the goal to develop a computer network with no center, one that would be immune to a Soviet attack. Other developments included digital switching of phone networks and the creation of the modem. In Sunnyvale, California, the birthplace of the semiconductor industry twenty years prior, Intel developed the microprocessor in 1971. Within five years, members of the Home Brew Computer Club in Sunnyvale, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, built their first computer, the Apple I. For another home-built computer, the Altair, Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first software program. In what would become known as Silicon Valley, the right ingredients existed for a milieux of innovation.¹ Over the next twenty years, these developments made their ways into businesses and homes worldwide. What was birthed was a new type of society, economy, and culture.

The impact of Global Information Culture is now unparalleled, as the vast majority of the world has connections to each other and to the Internet primarily through mobile devices. Every arena of the human endeavor has experienced a revolution of sorts through the introduction of new technologies into its particular sphere. But these massive technological upheavals have done more than simply change the way human individuals and human societies relate to one another. Human life is now fundamentally augmented by technology, blurring the lines between the human and the machine. Some celebrate these advances. Others are haunted by visions of a post-human techno-future. Either way, it is becoming increasingly clear that technological change is not simply about technological machinery. It’s about what it means to be human.

Over sixty years ago, Donald McGavran, founder of the School of World Mission and Institute of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, advocated, against Western Christendom forms of ecclesial life, that indigenous church expressions be initiated for all peoples within their own groups, location, and culture. For three generations students have been trained in these particular skills as they serve as missionaries throughout the Earth. However, in the network society, humans live not as groups, but as networked individuals.² They no longer live their lives in a particular place, but abide in the space of flow.³ And they are inhabitants not of a traditional culture, but rather live in the mediated space of real virtuality.⁴ Needless to say, loving one’s neighbor—the core driver of Christian mission in the world—may look quite different in the Network Society.⁵ In this particular volume we explore the changed landscape of what it means to digitally love our (often digitized) neighbor.

From the earliest days of the Christian faith, the followers of Jesus were to imitate the way Jesus served and forgave others in his confrontation with the Powers. They were to love their neighbors. To love one’s neighbor one would need to be fully engaged in cultural life. Jesus did not stand outside the practices of his day, e.g. table fellowship (convivial life centered in a common meal), but he fully participated in ordinary cultural practices, transforming them from within through love. Likewise, engaged Christians today do not choose the governing practices in which they participate, as if they could stand outside culture. Technological practices already exist as God’s mediating structures (the Powers) and the church’s task is to transform these practices, as insiders. Transformative engagement manifests differently in every type of practice, keeping in mind the church does not impose its way from a place of power, but comes to each practice as Jesus did—as a servant. Thus, while remaining faithful to the call to love and to forgive, the life of Christian communities (and how they care for their neighbors) may be expressed in novel ways in the space of flows (mediated digital space).

What is lacking is an understanding of how the radical changes effected in these numerous domains connect and relate to one another. What is required is collaboration between technological and theological minds in order to make connections across disciplines that will generate deeper understandings of our Networked epoch and how technological advances inform the mission of the church in 2020 and beyond. The time has come to host conversations between theology and technology—to begin to explore how Christian theology and missiology might be stretched to include interactions with Global Information Culture and its many manifestations: transhumanism, AI, Internet memes, Big Data, and virtue-based Apps, to name a few.

Being and Becoming Techno-Sapiens

Techno-Sapiens is devoted to engaging opportunities and challenges related to these many spheres. It gathers together leading scholars of technology, theology, and religion in order to explore the ways in which modern technology is neither solely a dehumanizing force in the world nor a mere instrument for evangelizing the world, but rather the very means by which incarnation happens—the media in and through which human bodies love the (digital) other.

Taken as a whole, the essays explore the following concerns as their starting points, each of which is oriented around the question of how technology encourages and/or inhibits the human capacity to love our neighbor:

Who is my (digital) neighbor? And for that matter, who am I? How have recent technological changes shaped humanity in general and what have been the implications of recent developments, specifically Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence, for techno-sapiens more specifically?

How does social media in particular allow us to love our (digital) neighbor? What are the implications of social media platforms (and their tendency towards facilitating less-than-civil interaction between faiths), as well as of Big Data, for cultural and cross-cultural life more specifically, and what are the implications as such for Christian practice?

How does one become a (digital) neighbor? What is the impact of technological changes on the practice of character formation in general and what are the implications of such especially for Christian communities as it pertains to Christian witness in the world?

Who is my (digital) neighbor?

And for that matter, who am I?

In addressing the first of these questions, Part I takes a closer look at who our digital neighbors are, and, perhaps more importantly, who we are digitally. In her chapter Religion and Posthuman Life: Teilhard’s Noosphere, Ilia Delio argues that technology has become embedded in human life itself. She wonders if transhumanism, in its focus on its own digital enhancement, fosters a truncated understanding of the role of humanity in the world. She acknowledges that Artificial Intelligence invites people to enhance their own lives, but it does not include personal transformation that leads to compassion and forgiveness. It is the spiritual practice of going beyond oneself, reaching out to God in and through material reality, that will give humans the ability to solve the problems of Earth, but this is not what transhumanism offers.

Descartes paved the way for a post-biological future, one that reduces the essence of humans to mind alone. Transhumanism takes up the same philosophical move. Delio, however, says no to the transhumanist vision that conceals a white, male, Eurocentric logic. She also refuses the Cartesian separation of mind from matter that is inherent in transhumanism. Finally, Delio says no to the transhuman hope that disembodied minds will be downloaded into machines as neuro-chips as soon as the year 2045.

Delio asserts that mind and matter are intertwined and mutually grow together. Against transhumanism, she advocates what Teilhard calls ultrahumanism. Consistent with Teilhard, Delio says yes to posthumanism and its vision of embodied humans working with machines to move evolution and themselves forward. Posthumanists, in contrast to transhumanists, celebrate the end of the autonomous subject and the birth of the deeply relational self. In this scenario, humans, in partnership with machines, jointly become something new as they connect to all creation through the obliteration of fixed differences. Human personhood is stretched into a complexified wholeness that crosses material boundaries. Race, gender, and being are constantly renegotiated through the splice, through deep interconnection with machine life. Humans merge with these machines as they extend themselves.

Somewhat in contrast, Noreen Herzfeld, in her chapter A New Neighbor or a Divisive Force?, is skeptical of the human capacity to harness the forces of AI for good. In her view, humans have a somewhat naive view of technology influenced by Hollywood, with robots who help, think, and act like us. Robots offer humans a faithful friend who serves as a faithful companion. However, as Herzfeld asserts, neither robots nor AI itself are our neighbors. Robots do not feel any emotions (nor will they ever) and AI exists in constantly running algorithms controlling our lives and restricting our freedom. AI/robots are not neighbors but are often malevolent forces that make loving our actual neighbors much more difficult.

It is empathic (even agapic) love that enables humans to differ from robots. Humans exist in a web of loving relationships—in a series of I-thou connections. Humans embody the image of God when they are in relationship with others, according to Herzfeld. Robots cannot treat the other as a Thou. Beyond eliminating many of our jobs and life decisions, AI will not tell us when we need to step away from technology to become human and to bind up the broken-hearted. Neither robots nor AI can meet the requirements of being in relationship.

To be a neighbor, Herzfeld states, drawing on Barth, one must be able to do four things: look the other in the eye, speak and hear the other, aid the other, and to do it all gladly. The Good Samaritan in the Gospels meets the Barthian requirements for a neighbor, hence, Christians practice a faith that is neighborly at its very core. The Christian faith is inherently incarnational: God took on a human body in Jesus. Through living and dying, God relates to humanity’s plight. The suffering of the embodied Christ expressed love, through presence, to all of creation, humans included. Transhumanism, manifesting itself through AI, fails to love the neighbor, human or otherwise.

How does social media in particular allow us

to love our (digital) neighbor?

Part II narrows in focus, exploring how social media allows us (or not) to love our digital neighbor, specifically our religious neighbors. Heidi Campbell, in her chapter, When Religious Internet Memes about Religion are Mean, writes that memes create a context that is fraught with stereotypes and truncated stories that serve as microaggressions. Memes encourage a hostile approach to the other, even towards uncivil action. Memes exist in the sphere of lived religion. They attempt to communicate everyday lived reality through images. Those who are the objects of these depictions experience them as hurtful and promoting hate. Memes spread rapidly online thereby quickly defaming and dehumanizing the religious other.

Campbell explores how memes depicting Muslims pass on bias against them based on stereotypes. She demonstrates that memes aimed at Muslims assert that they are angry Arabs, that they oppress their own women, and that Islam is anti-American. The memes also decry how liberal American leaders are naive about Islam’s true intent. These Islamophobic stereotypes are not new, but they are given new expression and new life online. These religious memes are typically produced by outsiders, do not contain nuance, and they seek to reduce the religious other through a single image and phrase. Memes create reductionistic caricatures of another religion, in this case, Islam.

Christian leaders may want to consider how to help their congregants through asking questions such as what message does the meme portray, and how might we respond? Campbell advocates that these memes might serve as a point of dialogue in order to increase digital neighborliness and demonstrate compassion for the religious other both online and offline. She imagines that dialogue regarding memes might demonstrate care and love for the other.

Pauline Cheong, in her chapter Data, Discernment, and Duty: Illuminating Engagement in the Internet of Things, discusses the innovations that live with us in our smart homes, churches, neighborhoods, and even embedded in our bodies. She explores how the datafication of everything impacts how we live. To be sure, church and mission leaders rely on large- scale data derived from sociological and anthropological studies. Numbers help church leaders simplify the tasks before them.

However, Cheong writes that, for some Christian leaders, the ends justifies the means, e.g., if data helps lead people to spiritual growth, then why not use it? Church members might feel liberated as Big Data gives rise to more custom church programming. However, the analyzed data responding to their choices might be considered manipulative rather than nurturing. Moreover, what are the privacy concerns when the gathering of data does not involve direct interaction with the subjects of the study, but instead is mined through massive aggregations of data generated online? New data creates economic challenges for churches as well. The accumulation of data may be burdensome as the responsibility of reporting and acting on data increases the workload of church staff. Finally, what are the economics of these Big Data practices? For instance, do members pay to get access to the best spiritual growth opportunities?

Datafication privileges some while disadvantaging others. Cheong points out that data gathering and analysis is never a neutral activity but comes already politicized, mirroring existing power relations and exclusions. She clarifies that even raw data is a misnomer, as it is often massaged even before it is first presented in order to align with existing power relations. As church and mission institutions begin to rely on Big Data for their strategic planning, power relations within those organizations undergo a shift: those with access to new data gain power while those without access lose it.

The question of who my neighbor is gets more complex as I relate to others through the Internet of things. An assemblage of software governs the reporting of each person’s spiritual life. New data unites and divides people based on the nature of what is collected. Every time an app is updated it redefines who is in and who is out depending on the value each data point is given. Given the expanded ability of research firms to mine personal data, the question arises: can Big Data help me better love my neighbor?

How does one become a (digital) neighbor?