Jione Havea (Ed.): MEDIAting Theology (Leseprobe)

46 Miguel M. Algranti
can be both deconstructed and expanded upon to include communities,
displaced practices and processes of cultural adaptations that are often
overlooked.
Take heed therefore how ye hear: for whosoever hath, to him shall be given;
and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth
to have (Luke 8:18).
1. Religion
It’s been canon for the sociology of religion, since the work of Emile
Durkheim (1858–1917), that religion, as a social phenomenon, relies
on the ontological duality between the sacred and the profane. These
two categories are considered to be so radically opposed that any possibility
of a middle ground is heresy itself. One could argue that this
pair of opposing classes are the basic unit for religious discourse and
the substance from which religious symbolic networks are made. 8
Moreover, according to Paul Ricoeur, myths are the specific form in
which religious symbols acknowledge this duality through narration
and dramatic structure. 9 The eternal struggle between good and evil offers
a narrative contour to religious symbols where the distinction
between the sacred and the profane need to be continuously reenacted
in rituals. Similarly, it’s been canon for information theory and digital
communications since the works of John Tukey (1915–2000) that a bit
or “binary digit” is the basic unit of information. One bit is typically
defined as the uncertainty of a binary random variable that is 0 or 1, or
the information that is gained when the value of such a variable becomes
known. It’s between 0 and 1 that every piece of code finds
correspondence between these values and the physical states of the underlying
storage or device. In many ways, salvation and digital
information use the same form of a binary unit to link the spiritual with
the mundane.
As Jeremy Stolow foresees, in today’s world of digital media, it is
essential to remember that religion always involves techniques and
technologies that we consider as “media” just as, by the same token,
every medium necessarily participates in the realm of the transcendent,
if nothing, by its failure to be fully subject to the instrumental intentions
of its users. It is also worth noting, in at least one etymological account,
that both the words “religion” and “communication” refer to the work
8
Cf. Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The exploit: A theory of networks, Minneapolis,
MN 2007.
9
Cf. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, Boston 1967.