Religion, culture and society in the 'information age'

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

Castells's (1996, 1997, 1998) work on the information society is instructive in this regard: not only does he believe that the powers of individual states necessarily wither in the face of global information networks (May 2002:34, 94, 120), but he also claims that the instantaneous exchange of information through computers has led to the collapse of past, present and future into the "timeless time" or "virtual time" of information exchange (Lyon 2000:121; see Castells 1996). Furthermore, the technologically induced reconfiguration of the social transforms humanity. For Castells, social networks now operate on the basis of humans who are configured like computers and, as such, have no means to make a necessary linkage between knowledge and experience (Castells 2000:21). This is how it is that the Internet becomes the principal metaphor for the contingent, fluid character of contemporary social life (Urry 2000:40-1), and how sociology becomes divested of much of its human content in favor of talk of the programs, nodes, grids, networks, virtualities and hypertexts of communications technologies. In so far as people figure at all, they are disembodied minds assimilating codes of information and images of representation (Castells 1997:84). In this respect it is notable that Castells touches upon knowledge and experience, but does not grapple with the embodied dimensions of being, which might encourage him to question the extent of this transformation of human beings and societies, or, at least, to grasp more fully the de-humanizing aspects of some of the processes he considers.

Paul Virilio's (2000) analysis of these developments, on the other hand, offers a much more robust critique of contemporary developments, particularly with regard to their dehumanizing consequences. Furthermore, he links dehumanizing processes with a corruption of knowledge that alienates us from our own being rather than simply talking about the circulation of knowledge within technologically constructed domains. In fact, Weber's (1991) concerns about modern science as a stimulus to the dominance of instrumental over value-rational action is multiplied several times over in Virilio's (2000:1) view of twentieth century science's "pursuit of limit performances, to the detriment of any effort to discover a coherent truth useful to humanity."

For Virilio, this absence of any connection between techno-science and common, human values is relentlessly enforced by the way in which global networks of information increasingly disconnect us from the Earth, bringing about "an end of geography," as time and space become warped by the cybernetic interactivity of the contemporary world (Virilio 2000:9). Within this cybernetic reconstruction of reality, the global becomes the center of things and the local the periphery, as virtual geography starts to dominate the real dimensions of the Earth (Virilio 2000:10). This domination is apparent in the construction of Internet communities, where the neighborhood unit is no longer local, but an elective, global association mediated by technology (Virilio 2000:59). Such communities operate on the basis of a "tele-presence," rather than an embodied encounter with others, across virtual time and space. In short, this lack of an embodied co-presence in our encounters with others means that we are increasingly deprived of our sensuality, and that our old "animal body" is increasingly out of place in this emerging symbiosis between technology and the human (Virilio 2000:40).