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Religion And Cyberspace

Author:	Morten T Højsgaard and Margit Warburg
Published By:	Routledge (London)
Price:	19.99
ISBN:	0 415 35763 2

Reviewed by Author unknown.

It is commonly stated that the Internet constitutes the biggest revolution in communication since the printing press. And although we should remember the broadcast revolution too, to this reviewer that seems to be true. It thus attracts academic interest, and this volume of sociological essays aims to examine religious use and issues relating to the Internet. It began its life as a conference in Copenhagen in 2001; the chapters are revised editions of those papers.

As the title suggests, this volume treats religion, not merely Christianity. It covers other major world religions and new religious movements. It discusses how religious experience might be mediated on the Internet, religious utopia and dystopia, the question of virtual reality, how the libertarian and democratic culture of the Internet challenges religious authority and issues of truth seeking. It looks at the matter of online religious identity, how religious organisations try to create community, and motives and desires for web usage.

This reviewer is not competent to judge sociology, but as a minister with an active and theological interest in the Internet, I believe there is one major omission from the discussion. These papers were prepared too early to make any real sense of the 'Web 2.0' phenomenon, the rise of websites that do not simply present static pages but make rich interactive user-generated content possible. In popular terms, I am referring to the rise of sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and the growing phenomenon of blogging, all of which have seen not only significant popular interest, but also major involvement from religious people. Their approaches present further theological issues and are even more post-modern than 'Web 1.0'.

If you lap up sociology, you may well wish to buy this book. If you want to consider how the digital revolution will affect church and ministry (on the grounds that the medium isn't simply the message, it is the worldview), then a better purchase might be The Millennium Matrix by Rex Miller (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2004; xxii + 280pp; £16.99; ISBN 0 7879 6267 8).