using the readings, please complete test 1450 PS. there is also a book that i will pass onto you once you download the rest of the class readings

New media are best thought of as interactive spaces rather than merely as collections of easily accessible texts. These spaces can be locations for religious practice, and paying attention to what is happening in them helps to explain changes in religion that are simultaneously taking place in physical settings.

Interactivity is the key attribute that distinguishes today’s digitalnew mediafrom old. This interactivity challenges traditional centers of authority by enabling a vast range of new voices. The ability to have one’s own voice and to interact with multiple religious and esthetic sources are basic resources for the construction of unique individual religious identities.

This chapter considers two questions. First, how are today’snew mediadifferent from old media. Second, how and why is religion changing in relationship to these changes in media? Earlier chapters suggested that religion has always been mediated and that religion adapts to changes in mediation. What then is dis- tinctive about the media change in what is often called the digital era, and how is religious practice adapting to these changes? Definingnew media The termnew mediahas at least two distinct meanings.

First, every medium was at some point new. New forms of communication inevitably challenge the assumptions about communication and culture of their day and make possible new media and religious practices. The development of the printing press and the resulting rise in literacy discussed in earlier chapters provides an obvious example of this. It is possible to go much earlier in human history in thinking about the impact of the development of new media.

Consider language itself as a medium of communication. Presumably the ear- liest uses of language were expressions of fear and desire, requests forfire, food, shelter, and sex. But, language also made it possible to articulate emotions, to recall the past and imagine the future, to tell stories and to begin to speak of spirits and realities beyond the immediate and physical realm. You can think of this in terms of human evolution but also see it in the life of an individual.

The early speech acts of a child developing language skills might name those on whom the child is dependent,“Mama”or“Dada.”Soon,“no”and“yes”give the child some control over her environment. As her language skills develop, this medium of communication becomes a place of play, of story, and of self- expression. Even today, as your composition professor reminds you, there is power in deepening the sophistication of your language.

The development of new forms of media and the practices that grow up around them draws our attention to their possibilities and limits. Again we can think of this in terms of individual development as well as within human history.

The child’s maturing language skills allow her to express her feelings and person- ality in new ways. When she is in the midst of developing these skills, the adults around her are particularly aware of the implications of these developments.

Later they may take for granted that she can speak, and they probably think little about what language adds and perhaps subtracts from her life. What is true in the development of the child is true for human communities as well. When peoplefirst discover and develop a new form of communication, they are extra attentive to how the medium is being used and to what we might be losing and gaining with it.

In this sense, a medium is new in the period when its basic forms and capacities are emerging and when people arefirst thinking about its influence on human communities. New media allow new forms of ritual, new ways to express belief and articulate a religious self. The relationship of religion, media, and culture is particularly evident as religion negotiates media change, for, once the mediations of religion are established, people become acculturated to them and they seem largely invisible.

Second, today the term new media refers to digital media and the Internet; and to the ease with which it is possible to sample, comment on and incorporate material from one form or message to another; and to the practices that have grown up around these technologies.

Summarizing the work of Lev Manovitch (2001), Heidi Campbell identifies five distinctive technical characteristics of new media. First, they aredigital, and therefore they can be mathematically manipulated with computers. Second, information (words, sounds, images) is organized inmodulesthat can be manipulated individually and organized into larger units. Third, much of the process of creation and manipulation of information isautomated, serving to increase speed and happening with limited human intervention. Fourth, these modules are infinitelyvariable, allowing for multiple versions of these new 54Religion in the midst of change media objects. Thefifth characteristic istranscoding: new media objects are easily translated from one format to another (Campbell 2010: 9).

Commenting on the social function and ethical implications of these new digital technologies and on the practices that develop around them, Lynn Schofield Clark notes four social characteristics of digital media. They arepersistent:

once uploaded to the Internet, information is difficult to remove. Second, they are constantlychangeable: easily copied, altered, and reposted. Third, they are scalable: what is posted can be reposted, making it easy for something to“go viral.”And fourth, digital media are easilysearchable: for good or ill, whatever is digitized and put on the Internet is easily recoverable (Clark 2012: 7).

A college or university website provides an example of a new media location that reflects these elements. It is a digital creation likely combining text, images, and perhaps sounds. Different departments and individuals provide digital information, which is then manipulated by the school’s marketing department and the Web designer to highlight key terms that will drive potential students or donors to the website. The information is easily changed and expanded to reflect changes in how the school wants to present itself. Transcoding makes it possible to embed photos of the football team, a recording of the commencement speaker, a faculty member’s blog, and admissions office forms in the site.

Because the information is modular (it is part of the whole, while remaining distinct), it can be easily changed. If a faculty member wins the Nobel Prize, information about her work can be added with little effort. And this modular structure gives the site depth; from the homepage you can click onAcademics, then on theFrench Department, then on the homepage of your French instructor Professeur Trudeau, and then on the professor’se-mailto explain why you will be out of town during mid-terms.

New media cannot be fully understood by focusing only on such institutional sites. In a world of transcodable and scalable new media, the college cannot fully control its digital presence. Others also have access to new media in ways that shape how your school is presented to the world. Googling the school’s name will pull up student reviews of the school and of individual faculty members. A reputation as a“party school”might emerge in students’Facebook pages. In the late 1990s, during a time of conflict on my campus, protesting students maintained a counter-website to the school’sofficial site expressing their complaints about the administration. More benignly, during a recent spring program of graduating student skits, my“official school photo”and those of several colleagues were downloaded and manipulated to comic effect. An understanding of new media needs to include seeing how the accessibility of these tools and media spaces enables the development of such personal, though hardly private, media practices.

It is not simply the technological marvel of the digital world that constitutes new media. The term also refers to the institutional and individual human practices that grow up around this technology and create new media cultures. To understand media cultures requires understanding both the esthetic forms available and the economic and political systems that control access to the means of production. Old and new media55 Access and power The question of who is making use of the possibilities of new media raises questions of access and therefore of power. The forms of communication that preceded the digital age, such as newspaper and book publishing and radio and television broadcasting, were expensive and were organized and controlled by corporate or government interests. These economic and esthetic systems will be more fully discussed in later chapters; here it is enough to note that access was limited by the costs of publishing and broadcasting and by the technical complexity which required particular skills and training.

Television provides an example of how economics and access shape a medium.

Before cable and satellite distribution systems there were a limited number of outlets. Broadcast quality video was expensive and complicated, requiring skilled technicians. In order to spread the costs, broadcasters sought the widest possible audience. This shaped the kinds of stories that were told and led to the develop- ment of organized systems, whether governmental systems such as the British Broadcasting Corporation or corporate networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC in the United States. Thus, a fairly limited group of producers, advertisers, and reg- ulators representing a few established centers of political and economic power controlled distribution and consequently the content of the programming seen by viewers. The vast majority of people were consumers rather than producers of media, and they had little influence on the content and structures of the media they consumed. In the midst of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, activist musician Gil Scott-Heron called attention to the limitations of the news media in what became an iconic song of the era,“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”In the song, still available on YouTube, Scott-Heron was commenting on the way that a few powerful economic centers controlled the key media outlets of the day and, as a result, influenced conventional political discourse. The song charges that these controlling bodies were missing the significant social changes going on at the time because the changes were happening in places largely invisible to the mainstream media.

One striking change brought about by digital technology has been the breakdown of the established centers of media power and the expansion of the range of available voices. Before cable and satellite television, American viewers chose what they would consume from among the programs offered by three controlling national television networks. Today, the networks compete with hundreds of programming sources, with video games, programming on the Internet, and amateur videos that may have been shot on someone’s phone and distributed on the Internet. Not only do people have a wider range of choices, they have access to more interactive media, allowing them to manipulate and respond to the images and narratives of popular culture. For many this blurs the line between producer and consumer.

The same point can be made about music production. In the old-media world of records and radio, the goal of a new band or individual performer was to sign a contract with an established record company and get their music 56Religion in the midst of change played on the radio in order to drive sales. Consumers were dependent on the record companies to recognize and record performers and on radio to intro- duce them to new styles and artists. How different is the music world today!

Digital technologies have changed the way that music is produced and con- sumed. Inexpensive recording and mixing technologies mean that artists can produce their own recordings. They develop websites, and use social media to develop a following. Some artists now think that record companies are an unnecessary anachronism, while others combine old and new means of pro- duction, promotion, and distribution. Here again, the distinction between consumer and producer breaks down as listeners download what they want; compile their own mixes of artists and styles; sample, pirate, and parody exist- ing music; and use sampled bits as background for their own creative projects. The political implications of the spread of voices in the media are obvious.

Repressive governments seek to control the media, particularly in times of unrest. But social media like Facebook, Twitter, and texting are much more di ffi cult to control than traditional forms of media. In 2011, during what came to be called the “Arab Spring, ”people in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and other nations of the region took to the streets and in some cases took up arms, demanding more democratic governments. New media made it possible for this revolution to be televised, sometimes by international news media from Fox News to Al Jazeera, and sometimes by cell phone videos posted and forwarded around the world. New media have not simply covered the revolution; they have been part of it (Figure 4.1). Social media were a key tool in fomenting and organizing the protests. This has not been without consequence. In Egypt, Google executive Wael Ghonim was arrested for his role in organizing Facebook resistance that led to actions in the streets. In recognizing the democratization of media worlds, it is important not to overlook the way in which governments and corporations continue to shape Figure 4.1 Egyptian protester streams a demonstration via Skype Old and new media 57 and control large segments of the contemporary media world. Repressive governments seek to control access to the Internet, and corporate media inter- ests continue to influence what is covered in news and entertainment media.

The economic systems through which independent writers, musicians, and journalists will make a living are still emerging. Exciting as the new media options are, the loss of the systems that established and maintained journalistic and esthetic standards has resulted in the distribution of work that is often sloppy and narcissistic. It has, however, also allowed people access to new voices and those reflecting non-dominant cultures.

Religion and new media Just as politics and the music and news industries have adapted to the culture of media, religion also responds to the possibilities and limitations of the digital environment. To understand religion today it is necessary to pay attention to how religious institutions, communities, and individuals resist and adapt to media change as part of negotiations of theological and political power.

When religiousfigures or institutions learn to use a new or changing medium, they grow in social power. If new leaders emerge who are quicker than established leaders to understand and adapt to the possibilities of emerging media they gain an advantage in the marketplace of ideas and practices. As these leaders develop new practices that take advantage of the potential of new media, religion changes in ways that may be striking or quite subtle.

Established religious leaders and institutions tend to trust existing means of communication and doubt that new forms will adequately express their tradi- tion. Only after a period of resistance to media change will they adapt to new media and it often takes time to live into the implications of these new tech- nologies. Today, for example, both the Pope and the Dalai Lama have Twitter accounts. When they, or perhaps others in their names, tweet, scores of people read the message. However, the change from old to new media is not simply a shift in communication platforms. Top-down systems of authority are challenged by a media culture that enables immediate response, critique, and conversation. When multiple voices have access to the media of the day, authority isflattened. Where once a few authorized religious voices were legitimated by their access to, and control of, the limited number of media outlets, today many competing voices have access.

Social media provide entrepreneurial space within which new religious practices develop and new religious leaders emerge. Access to new media allows these emerging leaders to develop a voice and a following without having to move slowly through the ranks of established religious communities.

People in roles such aswebmasterorbloggercan quickly amass religious influence when they use their roles to model and interpret religious belief and practice.

Tensions arise when these emerging voices interact with more traditional sources of religious authority. Community becomes more diffuse and practice more idiosyncratic. While religious authorities can be part of the conversation 58Religion in the midst of change in new media spaces, they can’t easily control the conversation. Their voices compete with others to set the agenda, interpret traditions, and prescribe appropriate religious practice. New media forms like Twitter and Facebook are conversational; they are structured to encourage comment and support. It would be naïve to assume that, by learning to tweet or maintaining Facebook pages, Roman Catholic bishops could reclaim the role they once had in the one-directional world of official Catholic publications and news outlets. The new media spaces require new forms of leadership.

It is not simply that new leaders come to the forefront in emerging media cultures. Today, religious practice may be changing in ways that alter how people relate to leaders or even their need for leaders. One form of traditional religious leadership was authorship. Leaders produced texts that became sacred, other leaders interpreted those texts, developed theologies, or wrote tracts intended to convert non-believers, and published commentary on con- temporary culture from religious perspectives. Followers read these religious works, weighed their meaning and authority, and attempted to apply their teachings to daily life. Part of today’s changing media culture is seen in the new Web-based interactive media that amplify the spaces for debate, such as chat rooms, Facebook, Web pages, Second Life, and so forth. While the audiences for old media were active as readers and responded in a variety of ways, the texts themselves werefixed. New media are introducing new levels of inter- activity that challenge the distinction between producers and consumers of media. When Wiki-like texts are under constant revision, when readers sample them, use them in new contexts, and comment on and change them it is dif- ficult to say who“the”author of a text is.

These new media developments lead to several new understandings of lea- dership. First, people are likely to follow multiple leaders and participate in overlapping communities, such as by following many religious leaders or celebrities on Twitter, rather than belonging tofixed communities with a single leader. Second, when possession of charisma and access to media are sources of authority, those whose authority rests on education and official position wield less persuasion. Third, in a culture of choice, individuals tend to think of themselves as having the authority to author their own lives. They draw from multiple sources without conceding to any single source the authority to direct their lives. Effective leaders in such a media culture may offer vision and direction, but they cannot be authoritarian. New language isneeded to describe and interpret religion in new media spaces. In the remainder of this chapter we will consider two terms that help serve this function.

Networked identity Networksignifies identity that is constructed and expressed through participation in multiple overlapping groups rather than in a single social location. Though the term is not unique to her, I am indebted to Heidi Campbell’s (2012) dis- cussion of the idea of“networked societies”and“networked religion.”The Old and new media59 rise of networks points to a shift in the predominant way that people relate to each other and express identity in contemporary Western culture. Certainly, people have long participated in communities that we might describe as net- works such as the family, the village or neighborhood, the religious commu- nity, and the workplace. But the termnetworked identity, as used here, refers to this multiplicity in combination with the resistance to the idea that some single setting is the primary center of identity in late modernity.

Internet-based social media provide a helpful image of networked relation- ships. The ability to sample and edit (transcoding), easily putting things in new relationships, is a metaphor for this new way of relating. Many people think of their own identity as being like a digital text constructed from the images and information they have gathered from multiple networks within which they function. My own Facebook page provides an illustration of a networked relationship. In pre-networked society I kept my various roles distinct, pre- senting myself in some places primarily in terms of my role in the family, in other places in terms of my relationships with professional colleagues and stu- dents, in others in terms of my religious community, and in others in connec- tion to those who share my passion for the movies or for bicycle racing. On Facebook these elements are simultaneously revealed. The different parts of my identity interact there, so that my Facebook friends from one network see me in relationship to others. Further, I am drawn into their networks, where I can see on their pages the posts of people with whom I have no other contact.

The significance of networks becomes clear if we contrast them with more linear, located, traditional forms of relationship. Identity and relationship were once understood as essentiallyfixed matters of one’s location within hier- archically maintained institutions such as the family, the church, and the nation-state, and through social constructions like race, class, and gender.

People largely inherited these identities, and changing them meant converting from one social location to another. In the West, for instance,“family”tradi- tionally referred to the biological nuclear family organized around its male head. It was the primary source of identity and one left it only through mar- riage, which created another nuclear family. Today, the concept of family is morefluid. People gather in a variety of households and partnerships that may be lasting or transitory. They may claim as family people to whom they are not related by blood and with whom they do not cohabitate. Varying understandings of authority and equality guide these relationships. In networked society one moves more easily in and out of various forms of“family.”Further, the family is but one of the many networks within which people perform their identity.

In a traditional system a person was one predetermined thing and could not easily become another. In the context of religion, the person was part of a particular tradition, say Judaism, and part of a particular cultural expression of that tradition such as a progressive British synagogue or an ultra-Orthodox Israeli community. The person’s race, class, and gender as defined by the hier- archy of her tradition further shaped how she expressed that religious identity.

Networked religious communities, on the other hand,“function as loose social 60Religion in the midst of change networks with varying levels of religious affiliation and commitment”(Campbell 2012: 83). Identity is not simple in networked cultures. Rather than occupying a single social location, individuals build a complex web of interconnection that links them to other people and communities. Their web is both personal and a part of the larger web of network society. Campbell writes,“The network image helps us examine the complex interplay and negotiations occurring between individuals and the community, new and old sources of authority, and public and private identities”(2012: 65).

Today, people practice religion and organize their beliefs through such overlapping networks. Again, contrasting this notion to the non-networked alternative helps make its significance clear. In the past, religious identity and belief was largelyfixed. Most often one inherited the religion of one’s parents or wholly broke with that tradition and adopted a different religious tradition.

One belonged to a particular synagogue, congregation, mosque, or temple and practiced in ways that were culturally and theologically normative for that community. In contrast, in a religious network one transcodes, creating reli- gious identity from multiple relationships. Membership and orthodoxy are less important to people in transcoded, networked relationships. These people may relate with varying degrees of intensity to several local religious communities, they may incorporate ideas or practices from teachers outside their tradition, and they may have personalized religious rituals and images. As Campbell put it,“It may be that in the future we will think of religious practices more in terms of the networks of interactions that produce them than in relationship to formal communities”(personal communication 2012).

A theological school colleague once commented that a Christian cannotfly Buddhist prayerflags. For him, the differences between Christian and Buddhist understandings of the religious life and its goals cannot easily be resolved. These religions’views on crucial matters such as what is sacred, the goals of the reli- gious life, and the way people should practice their religion are fundamentally different and the professor argued that religious identity is established in choosing one over the other. This perspective is rooted in the assumption that religion and religious identity should cohere around a theological center.

However, for the networked practitioner who simultaneouslyflies Buddhist prayerflags and worships a Christian God such clarity of center does not appear to be the goal. This person has cultivated her identity more through interactive practice than through the articulation of intellectually coherent systems of thought. Social media both illustrate and facilitate this networked way of relating, part of a larger pattern of modern social change that includes such things as geographic and social mobility and the rise of the individual.

Third spaces The idea ofthird spacesis another concept that is emerging to describe religion in new media cultures. The phrase captures the geographic analogy through which people think about new media. Consider the termonline. A verb we Old and new media61 often use with this term isgo,asin “I need to go online to check the movies that are playing. ”Using onlinein this way implies that it is a place we can visit.

It is a space, and in this space media cultures are at work. Hoover and Echchaibi (2012) provide a helpful elaboration on this concept.

They point out that the term third spacesevolved from the sociological notion of “third places ”that exist between the purely private space of the home and the public spaces of work and government. These are places where people gather and interact, such as clubs, bars, and cafes. In these venues activity is not purely personal, it serves a social good without being organized and directed. In digital culture there are virtual third spaces where people hang out and relate. These third spaces are shared, so they are not entirely private, yet they are not controlled by traditional religious institutions and authorities. In the language of religious studies these are locations of “lived religion, ”where people perform their religious lives. What the term third spacespoints to is the “ in-between-ness ”of these spaces. Hoover and Echchaibi write that the third spaces of religion exist somewhere “beyond institution (churches, mosques, denominations, faith groups) as the first space and individual practices as the second group ”(Hoover and Echchaibi 2012: 9). In third spaces religion happens outside the institutional, yet in ways that are not purely individual.Chapter 1discussed Hoover ’s assertion that the contemporary religious task is one of individual identity construction that draws on institutionalized and inherited practices and beliefs but is not contained within a particular religious institution or tradition.

The idea of third spaces expands on this insight by demonstrating that religious identity construction happens in conversation with others.

The informal third spaces where digital religion is practiced are often mea- sured against embodied institutional spaces and then judged on the basis of whether they are an adequate substitution for embodied or institutionalized religion. Hoover and Echchaibi disagree with this approach. They write, “ We do not claim they are in any way the ‘same thing ’[as institutionalized religion] …. [Third spaces] are in their e ffect ‘emergent cultures ’…fluid spaces of practice through which cultural power can be articulated, grasped and (potentially) deployed ”(Hoover and Echchaibi 2012: 12).

Drawing on post-colonial discourse (see Bhahba 1994), Hoover and Echchaibi argue that third spaces can be spaces of resistance to dominant beliefs and practices. Where religion has been a partner in oppression, their between-ness allows third spaces to sometimes be places “of disruption and invention … that …arguably unsettles the singularity of dominant power narratives and opens up new avenues of identi fication and enunciation ”(Hoover and Echchaibi: 14). These third spaces are not the locations of purely individual and perhaps self-indulgent play with the religious but potentially creative sites of liberative practice. In third spaces new ideals, claims, identities, and solidarities can be articulated that resist dominant voices, practices, and beliefs. One such online third space discussed is PostSecret, a Web-based project in which people anonymously express some secret on an often handmade or modi fied post card. This project is a location for confession, a practice typically 62 Religion in the midst of change thought of as religious. Each week images of elaborately constructed postcards are posted on the website. Some are traditional confessions of wrongdoing; others express secret personal trauma or emotional pain.

Once one might have gone into the anonymity of the church confessional and relied on the priest to pronounce God’s forgiveness. By way of PostSecret, however, people are able to confess to the unseen community of those who visit the site without the seeming need for official confirmation of forgiveness.

The process of posting has a ritualistic quality, and there is also a ritual in fol- lowing the posts. Visitors come to the online site to peruse the sometimes troubling, sometimes beautiful cards. PostSecret demonstrates the blurring of the boundary between online and offline. Some followers gather in small groups to read and discuss the cards, and the founder of PostSecret appears at public events, often on college campuses, to discuss the site.

In summary, this chapter suggests that the history of religion is always rooted in the story of its resistance and adaptation to changing forms of media. New media provide spaces for the development of new religious leaders and communities both within and outside of established communities of practice. These changes within religion reflect broader cultural changes brought about by access to new digital and online technologies. Today the access to these new media technologies that so easily segment, save, manipulate, and integrate information contributes to a sense that religious identity is itself constructed from multiple sources, and new religious communities and associations may be transitory or lasting. Discussion questions 1 The termnew mediais used in two different ways in the chapter. How does any new medium interact with religion? What evidence do we have of religions changing in response to new forms of media? What is distinctive about the digital developments that are called new media today? What new possibilities do they open, and what challenges do established religions face in today’s new media culture?

2 What is meant by the termdigitalmedia? What are the characteristics of the digital, and how is it changing media practices? The chapter suggests that people come to think of their own religious identity as a digital construction. Do you see evidence of this in the chapter or in your own observations? What are the implications of such a digital religious identity?

3 What evidence is there that religion and media were at work in the protests and uprisings that are often called the Arab Spring? How have social media and/or the news media been part of these social and political developments?

4 The chapter suggests that established religions have tended to resist new forms of media. Why is this the case? What challenges do established religious leaders and institutions face when media cultures change?Old and new media63 What possibilities for religious change and innovation do new forms of media create?

5 In her reflection on a religious video game Wagner suggests that, while patterned loosely on biblical narratives, the game and similar “first person shooter”games make the player a god-like savior. Is this “just entertainment,”or are there religious and political consequences to such game playing? Does playing such games shape the way people think about real world religious conflicts, and how they imagine intervening in them?

6Inareflection that encompasses both senses of the termnew media Hemenway thinks about how changes in the technology of the book have shaped the way religious texts are written, collected, and read.

How did the development of the codex contribute to the need to set afixed canon of the Bible? How are new technologies for gathering and searching sacred texts producing new ways of engaging these writings? References Bhahba, Homi K. (1994)The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

Campbell, Heidi A. (2010)When Religion Meets New Media, Abingdon: Routledge.

Campbell, Heidi A. (2012)“Understanding the Relationship between Religion Online and Offline in a Networked Society,”Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 80, No.

1, March.

Clark, Lynn Schofield (2012)The Parent App, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hoover, Stewart and Echchaibi, Nabil (2012)The“Third Spaces”of Digital Religion, http:// cmrc.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Hoover-Echchaibi-paper.pdf, Boulder, CO: The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture.

Manovitch, Lev (2001)The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

64Religion in the midst of change Reflection Gaming the end times Rachel Wagner El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (UTV Ignition Entertainment, 2011) is a contemporary video game that explicitly draws on Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition. The game is based on legendary stories about Enoch, a character mentioned brie fly in the book of Genesis in the Bible, who also has a very rich ancient apocryphal (extra-biblical) legacy of stories. In the ancient Jewish apocalypse and in later Jewish apocryphal mystical tradition, Enoch is depicted ascending through various levels or heavens, on a quest to understand the cosmos, guided by an angelic interpreter. Along the way, he is shown cosmological wonders, like where snow and hail are made, as well as visions of future judgment of the wicked and rewards for the righteous. El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron similarly relies upon the story of Enoch ’s ascension through levels of achievement, revealing a marked structural similarity between ancient apocalypses and contemporary video games. In both the ancient apocalypse and the video game, Enoch must confront various malicious adversaries who would hinder him in his goal of ascent. Indeed, the similarity between apocalyptic literature of antiquity and many modes of contemporary video game play is striking, since both are rooted in a fundamental distinction between “good ”guys and “bad ”guys, and both rely upon an eschatological worldview, that is, on the notion that an “ end ”is approaching, and a savior figure is needed to intervene on behalf of other human beings. Both the ancient apocalypse and the game, remarkably, fitthede finition of apocalypse developed by a team of biblical scholars in 1979, where they proposed that an “apocalypse ”is:

a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human reci- pient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world. 1 These scholars had in mind a whole set of ancient texts that were very popular around the turn of the first millennium among Jews and Christians.

If we think about it, many other contemporary video games also exhibit elements of this definition, even if they don ’t directly draw on speci fic biblical books like El Shaddaidoes. Video games “reveal ”other worlds to us; they also frequently include an otherworldly “guide ”of some sort (think of Cortana in Halo, for example); and they certainly often involve violent battles against brazen enemies.

However, there is a key di fference between ancient apocalypse and contemporary new media apocalypses. In ancient Jewish and Christian apocalypses, the savior figure is typically guided by a divine hand, taking the form of a powerful prophet or, in the case of Christianity, a messiah.

In contrast, in contemporary video games the savior figure is instead the player , who often wields a weapon and defeats enemies through self- initiated and strongly encouraged violence. Today ’s video game apoc- alypses, then, are markedly more individually determinative and less dependent on the notion of an external deity for change in the world. In other words, today ’s violent video games suggest that, instead of counting on otherworldly intervention to right perceived wrongs, the individual human being must depend upon his or her own savvy and willingness to directly exercise violence toward a particular end. He or she must also be quick, careful, ruthless, and precise, in e ffect “playing God ”themselves.

Are these positive shifts or problematic ones in the way we view religious intervention in today ’s world? Does it matter that the ancient apocalypses were about real enemies (the oppressive Romans in ancient Israel) versus today ’s imagined ones (monsters, war opponents, aliens, etc.)? Which is more violent, the ancient text-based apocalypses or today ’s video game apocalypses? What do you think?

Note 1The Society of Biblical Literature ’s (SBL) “Apocalypse Group ”, in J.J. Collins, Semeia , 14 [1979]: 9. 66Religion in the midst of change Reflection Codex to Kindle Michael Hemenway Books have long provided a medium for the material expression of religion. The particular technologies of“book”used by different religious groups in different times shaped the way they articulate their religious identities and practices. Buddhist Sutras were written on palm leaf book technology and Jewish Torah is traditionally inscribed on scroll book technology, both existing long before the codex that we know today.

The codex, the bound volume with covers and a spine holding together multiple pages of text, rows of which line the shelves of libraries today, was a new media form in antiquity. By binding multiple sheets of papyrus or parchment together at a spine and folding the pages in half this new mediation of book offered advantages in accessing texts. Instead of rolling continuously through a text tofind a particular location, as with a scroll, the codex provided non-linear access to the text. Readers could enter at any point and easily jump around in the text. How might this change in the form of religious books impact the way people imagined these texts or used these books in religious practice?

The codex enhanced the collection capabilities of the book. While technologies like the scroll were used for collections of texts, for example the Torah scroll containingfive writings, the non-linear access facilitated by the codex technology changes the relationship of these collected texts.

By the fourth century single codices contained large portions of what is now the Christian Bible. Collecting writings that once existed on separate scrolls into a single codex allowed non-linear access to any part of the collection. It mattered less where each item in a collection was located within the book. For example, in a Torah scroll, one must roll through Genesis to get to Exodus, while, in a codex, a reader simply opens the book 20 percent into the text. This may not sound like a meaningful distinction, but imagine for a minute,“How much of the way we conceptualize the world comes from the way we read?” Ironically, as the codex increased the possibilities for collection and access, it loosened the ties between these related texts because each could be accessed on its own with relatively little awareness of what came before and after it. The non-linear access facilitated by the codex had the potential to atomize a text or a collection of texts by allowing the reader to jump into and out of the text at any point.

The clear beginning and end of a codex, emphatically represented by covers, heightened questions about what got included. The potential of a book to gather a collection between two covers expanded the politics of inclusion and exclusion. When the norm is to have several scroll books or several palm leaf books in a collection there is less pressure to decide what is includedandwhatisexcludedbecausepeoplecouldeasilyaddordiscardtexts.

Binding the collection set a lasting determination of what was included.

Do you think the Christians ’desire to set a canon, to decide which reli- gious texts would be included in their Bible, might have been shaped by their decision to collect their sacred texts in codex form (Figure 4.2)? Today, e-books are again transforming the way we read and write religious texts. Some of these innovations have an analog in our ancient example of the codex. Though most e-books o ffer up anachronistic page turning and even digital library shelves for collecting books, search functions and libraries in the cloud exponentially expand on the non-linear access and collection capabilities of the codex. We can search for a single word in a book or in multiple books and move right to that spot in each text without “opening ”the books and with little awareness that the passage searched is located in a particular part of a larger text. When bits of text become atomized the boundaries between books becomes fuzzy. Imagine reading a book in Kindle reader on an iPad. The screen shows the cover of the book and lets you digitally turn the pages as you read. Yet, using the search functionality in Kindle reader, without even opening the book, you can search for “religion and media ”andKindlewilltakeyou to the first occurrence of that phrase in the book without your needing to understand that passage in relation to the whole of the book. The search index feature then jumps to the next occurrence of this phrase, again without you knowing anything about the larger landscape of the book. This is a radical non-linear access that is now being applied across digital collections as in Google Books.

How might this change the way people read their religious books? Figure 4.2 Bible and tablet computer 68Religion in the midst of change