No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-spiritual Practices

Abstract

Over the last decade, new information and communication technologies have lived a secret life. For individuals and institutions around the world, this constellation of mobile phones, personal computers, the internet, software, games, and other computing objects have supported a complex set of religious and spiritual needs. In this paper, I offer a survey of emerging and emergent techno-spiritual practices, and the anxieties surrounding their uptake. I am interested in particular in the ways in which religious uses of technology represent not only a critique of dominant visions of technology's futures, but also suggest a very different path(s) for ubiquitous computing's technology envisioning and development.am casting ICTs broadly to include personal computers, public computing sites (i.e.: cyber cafes, web-kiosks and gaming arcades), the Internet, software, games, accessories and gadgets (i.e.: USB flash keys, etc), mobile phones, other wireless devices and the various infrastructures that support them. And indeed recent surveys of internet habits, corporate marketing strategies, and new product developments, all point to the fact that there is a growing (perhaps already grown) segment of the population that uses technology to support religious practices, what I am calling "techno-spiritual practices". Some of these techno-spiritual re-purposings have been documented [2-8], some have been theorized [9-15], and some have been playfully and thoughtfully explored and elaborated [16][17][18], and there is certainly a growing literature about the impact of new technologies on Islamic practice [19][20][21][22][23], and wellrehearsed arguments on technological avoidances and resistances in certain religious communities [24][25]. For the most part, however, religious or spiritual relationships to, and usages of, ICTs seem to be marginalized to the realm of technological oddities, fodder for cheeky web logs and the occasional appearance in the pages of the New York Times or Wired, written off as just another trend.However, it is my contention that these examples of the ways in which new technologies are delivering religious experiences represent the leading edge of a much larger re-purposing of the internet in particular, and of computational technologies more broadly, that has been underway for some time. Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere [26] that ubicomp's frame of reference should extend to include any ICT that has a ubiquitous presence, this re-purposing could also be a subject of regular discussion or activities, developments and deployments in the ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) community. These techno-spiritual re-purposings are important for the ways in which they highlight alternate paradigms for technology creation, deployment, consumption and resistance, as well as pointing to different communities, practices and habits that could be supported. Furthermore, these repurposings seems to be of critical importance as the realm of technological infrastructure extends progressively beyond the office, into the ...

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“…Therefore, although we acknowledge that there are studies of technology in spiritual practices (e.g. [Bell 2006;Wyche and Grener 2009]), we are not intending to complement this field, but others, which we now go on to describe. …”