The Influx of Technology in Religion
Just the other day, my friend and I decided to meditate on a lazy Sunday morning. She said she follows a Chinese meditational video that is very soothing. Since it was my first time actually meditating with someone, I decided to try it out. I must say it was a calming experience for me. The best part about the whole experience was that I could do all this in the comfort of my home. I didn’t have to go to a meditation center; nor did I need a guru or mentor to guide me through the process. It was a no frills experience to say the least. To me religion is a very personal thing. And so this experience was just the right thing for me. Later when I pondered over the same, I thought this isn’t much different from what my parents and grandparents instilled in me as a ritual in the family. We sat together and prayed but the only difference here was that I had a choice of when I wanted to pray and how. During family prayers we never had technology play any role, but in this case the video was the technological element. But as most things that are debatable, this influx of technology into religion has faced a lot of flak from the traditional followers of religion.
The topic of influence of Technology in Religion is divided into two schools of thought. One set believes that technology has brought about positive change in the way religion is propagated, and practiced, while the rest believe something as pure and sanctified as religion should be kept away from technology to preserve its piousness. Some consider technology as the catalyst that fosters greater symmetry in relationships between clergy and congregants and encouraging greater institutional transparency. Many of these changes are positive, while others, such as distractions within interpersonal interactions and the search for meaning may be causing challenges.
By allowing the faithful to engage in religious activity regardless of where they are, these apps allow worshippers to create a religious world around them, even if they are physically in a very secular environment, said Dudley Rose, the associate dean for ministry studies at Harvard University’s Divinity School. In this way, smart phones can help serve as a bulwark against a society that increasingly moves religious observance out of public life.
For many religious institutions, the appeal of mobile devices is their ability to unite a religious community, regardless of the bounds of geography, said James Clement van Pelt, program coordinator of Yale University’s initiative in religion, science and technology. However, religious leaders who have already tried to conduct services over a mobile device to a geographically scattered audience, and those who have tried to integrate smart phones into a physically unified congregation, say they have noticed a significant difference in how worshippers process the experience.
Some religious scholars have found that most people tend to disengage from the experience of communal worship, and there is a nervous, excited energy that pervades the room and takes over. For many religions, nervous, excited energy is the exact opposite of the mental state a ceremony is supposed to produce.
But, do the youngsters agree? Not really. Younger worshippers expect any group activity to include smart phone use, but device multitasking has become such a pervasive part of their life that quiet, paper-text based religious ceremonies seem even stranger and more off-putting.
The concept of religious ritual is so deeply embedded in our social fabric that it is natural for it to have made the leap to virtuality. Social networks, including Facebook, have active and close-knit communities of religious followers of all creeds, gathering in what science writer Margaret Wertheim described in her 1999 book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, as "a new kind of realm for the mind"
"On the web, you're more easily able to find your tribe," explains Professor Heidi Campbell, a researcher at Texas A&M University, whose most recent book, When Religion Meets New Media, looks at how Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish communities engage with the web. "The distinctions and differences are amplified online." The greatest danger of the web is not that it will kill or change religion, but that, as Campbell argues, we will see the differences in our faiths because of our desire to find our own kind. So God does exist online if you believe he does, but for those who don’t believe this, there is always the traditional way. Religion is here to stay and we can love it or hate it, but we definitely cannot ignore it.