Religion, culture and society in the 'information age'

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2004 by Philip A. Mellor

Here, the focus is on theoretical issues and problems, particularly as these have repercussions for the sociological study of religion, rather than the empirical dimensions of studies of the information age. This is not to say that these empirical dimensions are unimportant. Indeed, it could be suggested that the lack of much in the way of empirical evidence to support claims about the "virtualization" of reality is a key feature of such studies: for all the contemporary dependence upon computers, televisions and mobile phones, for example, empirically oriented studies have demonstrated the continuing sociological importance of embodied relationships with real people in specific, geographical locales (Jenkins 1999; May 2002). Further to this, it might also be said that information society theorists, and, more broadly, advocates of post-societal sociology, tend to ignore all evidence to the contrary and simply take for granted the decline of nation-states in the face of global information flows (Billig 1994; Urry 2000; see Fulcher 2000).

While questions about empirical evidence are significant, however, theoretical considerations about the kind of existence social and cultural phenomena have, and how these relate to human potentialities and powers, are, perhaps, of greater importance. Here, it is worth noting that a key insight of the social realist vision of sociology is that social reality is not a one-dimensional phenomenon to be apprehended only through hard data, but is complex and multi-layered with some non-empirically observable elements that can be known only through their causal effects (Durkheim 1995:12-18; Archer 1995:50; Mellor, 2004). Further to this, I suggest that a critical re-engagement with Durkheim's (1995) theoretical account of the intimate connections between religion and society, which embodies this social realist approach, can provide a more useful corrective to some of the more extreme claims associated with theories of the information society than an account of their empirical deficiencies. Before discussing that, however, it is important to outline some key characteristics of post-societal perspectives that are beginning to have a very significant impact upon certain areas of sociological theory, and to sketch out how these relate to theories of the information society.

THE CRITIQUE OF SOCIETY

Although the conventional view of sociology as the study of society is being challenged on a number of fronts, many of them tend to congregate around the idea that "society" is an arbitrary construct of certain types of sociology, political ideologies and cultural theories, that has been imposed upon the complex, shifting and infinitely variable patterns of social and cultural existence. Postmodernist philosophy offers an influential post-societal perspective built on this type of argument. Its philosophical genealogy can be traced from Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God and his deconstruction of all claims to truth as manifestations of a will to power, through Foucault's death of Man and the reduction of reality to competing discourses representing power interests, to Baudrillard's death of the social and the collapse of reality into the simulacra of the "hyper-real" (see Archer 2000). Not only Baudrillard (1983, 1990a, 1990b), but also Deleuze (1979), Lyotard (1984) and Derrida (1991) have all encouraged, directly or indirectly, a deep skepticism about society, suggesting that it is simply a culturally relative construction that masks the endemic plurality and indeterminacy of human life. Baudrillard's arguments concerning the death of the social, however, have been particularly influential.