Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural

摘要

The impact of high technology has been felt everywhere in society, luminously enacting the deepest expressions of the human imagination. From its origins fifty years ago, the history and theology of religion and technology has witnessed an explosion of work by academics such as Langdon Gilkey, Ian Barbour, and David Noble, and a more recent and even larger eruption in scholarship on the history and philosophy of religion and computing. The editors of Believing in Bits, Simone Natale and D. W. Pasulka, join this growing body of work by arguing that “religious beliefs and practices are inextricably linked to the functioning of digital media” (3). In their collection, seventeen scholars share perspectives from a variety of humanities and social-science disciplines and cross-disciplinary specializations. The chapters are loosely organized into three parts: “Archaeologies of the Digital Supernatural,” “Believing in Digital Worlds,” and “Spiritual Relationships between Technology and Humans.” Using the combined lenses of media archaeology and digital-media studies, the authors present original approaches to the examination of religious beliefs in new media.Natale and Pasulka point out in their introduction that global producers and consumers, confronted by Internet connectivity, advanced robotics, AI, automation, and big data, are influencing human choices about who or what to trust. They reference an assortment of important moments in the history of expert systems and machine learning. Some of these moments include Alan Turing's proposal of a test to determine whether a computer can think like a human being, the coding of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA chatbot, and Hans Moravec and Dmitry Itskov's separate plans to upload human minds into an artificial substrate. These inventions affect day-to-day “belief in technical systems,” and support interactions between faith and computing (and mechanical contraptions generally) within larger belief systems (4). So temporal is this faith, the authors argue, that contemporary societies are comfortable thinking of advanced technologies as spiritual mediums for deliverance or as magical, animated, and alive.Natale deploys media researcher Taina Bucher's concept of the “algorithmic imaginary” in the opening essay, “Amazon Can Read Your Mind: A Media Archaeology of the Algorithmic Imaginary” (8). Bucher is well known in new media and society circles for scrutinizing the commonplace influences and manipulations of algorithm-driven Facebook experiences. The effects flow in both directions: algorithms drive the feeds we follow, and we form impressions about how they work (or do not work). These experiences also help us to make sense of algorithms and form judgments about them. One of the uncanny (or creepy) outcomes of modern ontological and epistemological debates about algorithms is the feeling that algorithmic systems are clairvoyant. Natale explains that this is not a new phenomenon, as mid-twentieth century students of cybernetics recognized the “concept of mindreading in reference to computation” (20). David Hagelbarger's SEER (Sequence Extrapolating Robot) built in the 1950s at Bell Labs, for example, appeared able to predict the sequence of human actions in the game of matching pennies. Matching pennies is the classic example of a zero-sum game, but because human-produced sequences tend to be nonrandom, SEER quickly becomes an outguessing machine. A more recent mindreading machine is Amazon's anticipatory shipping, which predicts what consumables to automatically deliver to customers by inspecting troves of archived purchasing data.Anthony Enns' “Information Theory of the Soul: Spiritualism, Technology, and Science Fiction” (chapter 2) explores the notion of “human identity as informational patterns” (39). Enns points out that ghosts, avatars, and AI are technological soulmates today, much in the way that neurology and spiritualism were medical bedfellows in the nineteenth century. A similar poin