Network Culture
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... conscious mind? Blogspots, Amazon, Ebay and Facebook have all become spaces that people inhabit and take up social positions within as Pierre Bourdieu would say.
My work seeks to contextualize this new network culture in a number of ways. Firstly, I've come to think that the first step to understanding something like the internet is to see that it is not one thing. Rather it functions as a series of apparatuses that require focused investigation. So, by looking at a specific apparatus like search, most notably in a company like Google, we can gain new insight into the way our notion of access and the universal are being transformed in network culture. So too, by looking at specific terms and concepts such as "icons" or the "infinite", we can understand more clearly how these ideas are changing the cultural understandings of theological notions as omnipresence, omniscience and transcendence more generally.
This leads to second key facet of how I approach network culture as a theologian. I am trying to create a subtle reversal in my work in this regard. In my current work, I am not developing a cultural interpretation relevant to theology. Rather, because of the nature of key concepts within network culture itself, I understand theology to be inherently valuable and relevant. So, precisely because the history of the codex is a Christian history, it implies a theology of the book as such. So too, because the nature of icons and representations of the infinite has a long theological history, it is ready made for reflecting upon these terms in cyberspace. In other words, my work tends to inquire into those aspects of network culture which are inhrently theological.
Lastly, included within this notion of network culture is the increased (ab)uses of surveillance. On the one hand, surveillance is nothing new and rooted in modern western democratic culture, as Foucault helpfully pointed out. However, the information electronic age has given surveillance new forms and modes of power which require further reflection. Again, thinking theologically, I'm interested in the secularization of the eye of God in western political culture. For instance, is Kant's "as-if" not implied by the use of the camera in urban centres? So too, is there not an ironic convergence between surveillant ideology and post-Heideggerian philosophy of religion?
Publications and Presentations
"The Return of the Scroll: From Codex to Google" in Digital Faith and Culture: Perspectives, Practices and Futures, edited by Pauline Hope-Cheong, forthcoming 2011.
“Canon after Codex,” Paper to be presented at the American Academy of Religion 2010 Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, October 30 - November 2, 2010.
"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
"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