Network Culture
"After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western World is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned." Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 3
As Manuel Castells, David Harvey and other geographers of the postmodern condition have been pointing out, our increasingly global capitalist societies are becoming vast networks or "spaces of flow" which are deeply informed by electronic culture. What they are uncovering is that our lives are increasingly marked by the confluence of social and cyber spaces. Nowhere is this more clear than in today's Disneyized urban centers with their dense networks of mobile on the go communication. Google has become a noun, verb, calendar, email archive, search engine... god? Cyberspace has simply blended into our social environments. Blogspots, Amazon, Ebay and MySpace have all become spaces that people inhabit and take up social positions within as Pierre Bourdieu would say.
It is no stretch of the imagination to wonder how this new network culture changes how people think about such theological notions as omnipresence, omniscience and infinite transcendence more generally. No longer do we look for a cultural interpretation relevant to theology, but rather, theological reflection is proving increasingly relevant to cultural theory. As such, my work tends to inquire into those aspects of urban culture which are inhrently theological. One relevant question in this regard: How is the infinite nature of the on demand world we can surf and explore different/similar to the infinite nature of God?
Publications and Presentations
"The Return of the Scroll: From Codex to Google," Paper presented at the Returning to the Church Conference: Valuing Theological Education, St. Stephen’s House, The University of Oxford, January 4-6, 2010.
"Urban Surveillance: The Hidden Costs of Disneyland." International Journal of the Humanities vol. 3, no. 8 (Fall, 2006).
“Urban Surveillance: From Concentration Camps to Disneyland,” Paper presented at The Fourth Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities, Renaissance Ilikai Waikiki Hotel, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 11-14, 2006.
“Cyber-Space of Possibles,” Paper presented at The Cyberspace 2005 Conference, Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, November 7-8, 2005.
“Urban Surveillance: From Concentration Camps to Disneyland,” Paper presented at The Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, University of Cambridge, August 2-5, 2005.
“Redeeming the Icons.” The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 6, no. 2 (April, 2005).
The Urban God and Surveillance Society. MA Thesis, The University of Manchester, 2004.
Cyberspace “is the ultimate in the secularization of the divine, for here is a God who sees and knows all things, existing in pure activity and realized presence, in perpetuity.” Graham Ward, The Postmodern God
"Is the notion of the 'aetheric' body we can recreate ourselves in Virtual Reality not the old Gnostic dream of the immaterial 'astral body' come true?" Salvoj Zizek, On Belief
In New York, it is estimated that there are over twelve hundred CCTV cameras per square mile in Manhattan. Currently, there are tours of the surveillance sites in New York city as well as street performers who act for the cameras. - Wired Magazine