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

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48 Miguel M. Algranti the context of our contemporary geography of digital information flows, virtual reality, panoptical visualization, concentrated media ownership and fragmented audiences, it seems no longer possible to contain religion within the confines of “traditional” social logic of institutional loyalty, the performative demands of face-to-face interaction, the controlled circulation of sacred texts, or the localized boundaries of “ritual time.” 2. The Lamp under the Bushel There is an absurd paradox that sits at the center of our modern world. While technological progress has produced the infrastructure for a free international communications network, people are more disconnected than ever. Occupation, gender inequality, exploitation, displacement, xenophobia, racism, and religious bigotry are at the order of the day. The futuristic utopia that digital media was predicted to bring for humanity has been, instead, replaced by radical political segregation based on information technologies. The current state of extreme political polarization is a secondary consequence of these technological transformations that we don’t fully understand. The real power of digital media is not what it allows us to see but what it can strategically hide from our sight. Understanding the form and dynamic of this digital polarization pushes our chances forward for constructing a critical approach to the subject. The possibilities are endless; on the internet you can find an audience because you can segregate across the world. Little niche audiences of every country can come together and support an enterprise. As we share content online, there is some form of evolution within the circulation of user-generated information: we can make a picture of a cat with a catchy phrase like “he got tuna,” but as the picture spreads people can tweak the image or the phrase until the best iteration get shared and spread across the internet. The same process happens with religious, theological, political or ideological arguments, different versions of the same case can and will pop out. Debates on the internet are a pantomime; 14 people are not debating at all. Communities create what they think their opponent’s argument is, then agents within that community can tweak that argument to evolve it until it becomes a version of itself that triggers an emotional response that compels the user to share it with everyone else. “Look at what the other side thinks, see how awful it is.” Content in the digital networks keep evolving ideas until they get 14 Cf. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, in: Public Culture 14, 2002, 49–90.
Religion and Media 49 terrible – those are the ones that get shared and shared. Like in evolution, we are changing arguments to make the worst of themselves and then share it. This dynamic is leading polarization across the world. Moreover, the internet is organized by algorithms that are designed to distribute the most engaging content, the one that compels an emotional reaction and gets us liking or sharing and promoting those even further. This dynamic is where fake news comes from, instead of bringing people together fake news tear the social fabric apart. The World Wide Web let us form social groups and evolve our prejudice further and further. While the rise of digital communications blurs the lines between the transmitter and receptor, our ideas and debates had been radicalized and polarized to the point of no return. 15 Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) put each of us at the center of an extensive web of connections and make the consequence of our moral decisions much more immediately manifest. Instead of hearing about one alarming thing a day, we hear about 500 disturbing things. We are obliged to engage with the dark side of modern society by clicks and emojis while in the comfort of our private walls. Humanity is seriously networked together more than we ever have been, and the subject choices are amplified and distributed not only far faster than ever but with far more impact. A few years ago, the interplay between social media and militarist politics was relatively anomalous, mainly located in the Internet’s margins, infrequently covered in the media, and poorly understood. Over these years, the militarization of social media and other digital communication tools grew on a massive scale, commensurate with the global spread of social networking and mobile technologies. From the utopian horizon of a connected world, where information flows freely, a new level of social engineering has emerged. These past few years have been a testament to the hijacking of democracies (Cambridge Analytica) and the interplay between military occupation and digital media as in Israel. A new type of occupation is taking place in the virtual space of our sensibilities, the occupation of subjectivity. In today’s technological landscape, scholars of religion have been emphasizing the modalities in which religious, faith-based congregants and laypeople can engage with one another. This process allows for the deconstruction of lived religion in the twenty-first century as well as resignifies its importance in everyday life in a way which emphasizes 15 Cf. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, Cambridge 2002.
Page 1: Jione Havea (Ed.) MEDIAting Theolog
Page 4 and 5: 6 Contents The Palestinians, Israel
Page 7 and 8: Introduction Media makes religions
Page 9 and 10: Introducion 11 land and its resourc
Page 11 and 12: Introducion 13 oppose the hegemonic
Page 13 and 14: Introducion 15 enough to be inspire
Page 15 and 16: Mediating the Real - A Native Take
Page 23: I. Mediascapes
Page 26 and 27: 46 Miguel M. Algranti can be both d
Page 30 and 31: 50 Miguel M. Algranti that religion
Page 32 and 33: 52 Miguel M. Algranti divine. In ad
Page 34: The cover design makes use of art w

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

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