Virtual Communion. Katherine G. Schmidt
us and blinds us to the realities in which we live, leaving us powerless to think about how to be and act in the world.”58 Thus enters Miller’s concern over the emphasis on identity: we pick and choose our identity markers from the variety of choices to which we have (unprecedented) access online. The internet is a product of consumer mentality as well as a way to reinforce it.
Detweiler picks up this theme in his chapter on Amazon.com. His argument here is that Amazon’s voracious appetite to be the single purveyor of all goods perpetuates materialism and our insatiable desire for more and more stuff. His antidote appears to be something like a relational consumerism, wherein our economic behavior is structured not just by price and expediency but by relationships. He writes, “All that time spent online is a step away from human contact. . . . Products used to be created and distributed locally. We knew the cobbler, the tailor, the candlestick maker. . . Shopping became transactional and impersonal.”59 The practical effect of this for Detweiler is the way in which it forms contemporary perceptions of church communities. He argues that Amazon’s model of personalized shopping and consumer reviews (anyone is able to leave a review on a product on Amazon) has made its way into how people choose their church homes. Sites such as Yelp allow users to leave reviews of churches and other religious communities, turning communities into commodities.60
The theological antidotes to the “info-glut,” to use Thompson’s phrase, are varied. Thompson’s argument throughout his text is that Thomas Merton’s contemplative project provides much needed respite from the technologized society in which we live. He applies Merton’s reflections on the media of his own time, specifically as they related to advertising, to the technologies with which Thompson finds so many problems. He finds several facets of Merton’s own life appealing. First, we must reject the passive subjectivity which many media, especially television, require. Secondly, “we must redevelop our sense of community with neighbors, parishes, civic associations, clubs and families.”61 But the most important antidote to the technological mentality is to cultivate a contemplative prayer life. For Thompson, “The modern technological world and its communication forms have lost the best part of life, the access to a more profound vision that encompasses both temporal and spiritual realities.”62
Detweiler’s suggestion is related, though not as concretely argued. He concludes his work by championing a retreat into the wilderness, “As we hurtle down toward an unknown future with technology, we must plan some conscious pauses and be willing to use a mute button in our lives.”63 He also argues that the abundance of the Garden in Genesis 2 should give us pause, reminding us that true abundance is life with God and not in the “stuff” we fashion by ourselves.
Besides the emphasis on contemplative prayer and silence, two themes persist around this particular theological concern. The first theme is the ecclesiology of the local Christian community. The community functions as the Christian response to an online existence characterized by individualism, fragmentation, and reckless consumption of knowledge, goods, and other people. The Christian community provides the infrastructure and traditions for ways of life that can counter these pernicious behaviors. The second theme is implied in this emphasis on the local Christian community, and it concerns the category of the “real.”
Andrew Root frames the unmitigated access afforded by the internet in terms of the question of reality itself. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard, he writes, “Thanks to our screens, we live in an age where symbols and actualities are no longer necessarily connected, where life becomes about consuming images, about correlation to un-real (hyper-real) simulations of beauty, wealth, and celebrity.”64 Although not as explicit as Root, this distinction between the “real” and the not-real or not-as-real symbols and signs of the internet pervades theological discourse about the internet. After all, the salient point of Thompson’s cataloguing of culturally detrimental consequences of the internet is to demonstrate how we are being rent from reality itself. In both Root and Thompson, the antidote for the persistent attack on the real is to be rooted in the local community of the church. The church, they argue, offers the truly embodied experience of human life of which the internet can only be a simulacrum. Perhaps the most common evidence for this is the essentially disembodied reality of the internet, an aspect that causes great anxiety for theologians and to which we now turn.
Disembodiment
A common assumption is that when a person is online, her interactions with both content and other people lack “bodily-ness” in a way that offline life does not. This assumption is quickly followed by another, with a more critical edge: “embodied” interactions are more real and therefore better than disembodied ones, meaning that as necessarily “disembodied,” online interaction is less real than offline interaction.65 It is not difficult to see how theologians find cause for concern here, especially in a tradition where materiality and the body play such vital roles in the sacramental and liturgical life of the community.
This notion of disembodiment within online communication appears in both scholarly and popular commentary about the internet. The problem with the internet, we say, is that whatever social interaction takes place there cannot measure up to its offline counterpart precisely because our bodies are somehow not (as) involved. This sentiment appears in explicit or implicit form in nearly every critical account of the internet. It tends to rely on a more general assumption that technology draws people away from the “real,” and for theologians and other religiously minded people, being drawn away from the real is being effectively drawn away from source of the real: God.
The editors of America magazine provide a summary of the stakes here. They write, “[D]igital isolation will only grow more acute as technology progresses. Imagine being attached to your computer at all times, whether through your watch or your glasses. Genuine human encounters will only be more difficult in a society filled with digital barriers.”66 The editors’ use of the word “genuine” here is illustrative. I would argue that what they mean here is that embodied encounter unmediated by digital technology is more real than encounters that are.
This assumption runs so deep in critiques of the internet that it is often difficult to separate it from the many other concerns already discussed here. I would argue that disembodiment, by and large, undergirds most of the theological accounts of the internet, if not the nontheological as well. There is a common perception that the increase of the virtual means a decrease of embodied experiences. We are worried that the body will become less relevant to human life. Surely there are some who would argue that human evolution is moving in this direction. So-called “transhumanists” speak of an existence beyond the confines and obstacles of the physical body.67 This makes theologians (and probably many non-theologians) understandably nervous. The experience of the body is central to how we have thought about what it means to be human since the question was first posed. It is possible that the resistance to transhumanism is at the root of an explosion of scholarship on the “body” from all kinds of academic disciplines.
In reaction to these transhumanist impulses, there has been a tendency to assert the reality of embodied experience over disembodied ones. Therefore, perhaps the most common expression of this particular anxiety over disembodiment is in the real/virtual binary. We saw this in Andrew Root’s comments about symbols above. The internet, according to Root, has created a realm of the “hyper-real,” which competes with the reality toward which the Christian community is oriented. He writes, “To proclaim the gospel is to speak of the real—most fully, Jesus Christ. But this Christ who is incarnate and crucified can only be found in existence itself, in the realness and fullness of the human experience.”68 But Root never defines “the realness and fullness of the human experience,” presumably because he doesn’t think he has to. He simply assumes that his words signal, by necessity, a non-digital experience. This is simply what he means when he uses words like “real,” “full,” and “human.”
The effect of this is to separate anything that can be described as “virtual” from being described as “real.” What is important is the assumption that genuine or real relies upon a particular version of embodiment, namely that which we perceive to be unmediated. This creates a kind of hierarchy of encounters among the unmediated and the digitally mediated. Should this remain a binary, however, it misses so much