Cyberweave - Mary Montgomery-Clifford

Here's an interesting statistic: According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 21 percent of Net users seek spiritual material online. That's 19 million to 20 million people according to phone surveys of Net users instituted by the project, which studies the Internet's impact on various segments of society.

The growing use of the Internet as a tool for spiritual and personal growth and development is garnering a lot of interest and study. This includes my own Spirituality & the Internet Research Project, which I am pursuing as part of a Masters in Religious Studies at Chicago Theological Seminary in Hyde Park. Part of that research means delving into the thoughts of Internet and Spiritual experts, either by reading their books or through interviews. I was able to do both with Dr. Brenda E. Brasher, author of Give Me That Online Religion.

In addition to being an assistant professor in religion and philosophy at Mount Union College in Alliance Ohio, Brasher is also a media commentator on online religion and millennialism. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel. She is regularly quoted in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and U.S. News and World Report.

Brasher focuses on religion -- the traditional, the new, even the strange -- rather than spirituality, a term that she seems more than a bit uncomfortable with. "I don't like masking religion under the term spirituality," she states. "That's too amorphous." She points out that anything that develops its own organization and set of rituals should be classified under the heading of religion.

This definition is evident in Give Me That Online Religion. Chapter six, for example, is called "Virtual Shrines and the Cult of Celebrity." The chapter explores something Brasher calls "virtual celebrity worship." Many people may laugh at the concept, but Brasher doesn't. She points out that there is "a genuine spiritual dimension to it," as well as "a moral impact dimension." Rather than laughing, she says, it is better to analyze and understand, to find out what the personal meaning is. "Young people will stand in line for tickets to see a celebrity," she says. 'You don't find them in lines for religion." With this in mind, chapter six categorizes virtual celebrity worship into three types of sites: memorial, altar, and community. Memorial sites seek to preserve the memory of a celebrity by functioning as a virtual destination for pilgrimage; altar sites literally idolize celebrities by presenting a framework for cultic devotion; and community sites organize fans into congregations.

This is only one focus of Give Me That Online Religion. Brasher also explores the Internet usage of both traditional and radically new religious groups. These range everywhere from Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy /fundamentalism to virtual prophets of the apocalypse to neopagan magical practice. Chapter four is particularly intriguing because it focuses on the Internet pilgrimages of three people and includes glimpses into a Jewish Cyber-Seder, a virtual Benedictine monastery, and the adventures of a practicing cyber-witch.

One of Brasher's central premises is the concept of the cyborg. According to Brasher, a flagrant result of technological saturation "is that people are being transformed into cyborgs: partly imaginative, partly real creatures evoked into existence through human-computer semiotics." She adds that "the computer is homogenizing the human. Day by day, we become more and more cyborg."

I don't know about you, but the term cyborg gives me the willies. The word immediately brings to mind visions of those robotic automatons from some 1930s black and white sci-fi film — or the drones who were finally liberated in that famous 1984 commercial that introduced the Macintosh computer. For me, the very word cyborg has an ugly sound. I shared my discomfort with Brasher and asked about the juxtaposition of her views on cyborg in relation to the other premise of her book: that the "imaginative energy of this new medium [the Internet] is fueling a new dimension in religious practice and thought."

Brasher clarified her position by stating that the impact of cyborg is not universal. "I don't think the impact is the same for everyone," she says, "and that's what I'm dealing with in that chapter [chapter seven]." For Brasher, whether you become a cyborg or not, correlates with your strata in society. "For people in positions of privilege [i.e., intellectual workers], this is marvelous," she states. "For people not in positions of privilege, some features of computer-culture can become quite oppressive."

Hmm... that's some real food for thought. What do you think? I'd like to hear your thoughts, so e-mail me at Monty764@aol.com.

There's lots more in the book than I can cover in a short column, so I suggest that you go out and buy it. It is available online at Amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble (www.bn.com) and probably at many bricks and mortar bookstores as well. It's worth a read and includes a number of very interesting religious (dare I say spiritual) links. In addition, you might want to check out Brasher's own web site at www.muc.edu/~brashebe. The design is rather basic, but the information is great.

Do you have a favorite spiritual or personal growth Web site that you'd like me to review? Please drop me an e-mail at Monty764@aol.com. And remember, I also want to hear your story about how the Internet and the World Wide Web have impacted your journey toward self-realization. Your contribution will help me complete my research project on Spirituality and the Internet.

Mary Montgomery-Clifford is a certified web author and developer. Her company, Montgomery Media Enterprises ("Freelancing with Finesse!"), specializes in public relations, events, promotions, writing project and web authoring, development and publicity. Ms. Montgomery-Clifford is currently studying for a Master's Degree with an emphasis on inter-religious studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary and is in the process of completing the Morris Pratt Institute Course on Modern Spiritualism. Contact her via e-mail at Monty764@aol.com, by phone at 773-235-8821 or at her web site at www.montymedia.com

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