How has virtualisation impacted on notions of identity?

How has virtualisation impacted on our values as human beings?

How has increased connectivity impacted on the nature of our organisations?

How has increased connectivity and virtualisation impacted on our ability to develop meaningful communities?

Is a regulatory framework desirable?

What are the theological implications of the changes being brought to individuals, to society and to organisations by increased connectivity and virtualisation?

This is all good stuff and very relevant in our technology-oriented world.

Overall, the day was interesting enough, with some very challenging issues raised about our use of such technology, our expectations of privacy and much else. However, I was left with the abiding impression that none of the advertised topics was adequately addressed, there was no clear direction for where it was all going and, depressingly, that there was a bit (more than a bit) of disconnection with the reality of the pace of change and the uses to which the technology was being put. I can see the panel ending up commenting on technology that has long since fallen out of favour or moved beyond how it is being used at the moment.

Anyway, that’s really by way of introduction to what I want to mull over. One of the ideas that was floated around was that of ‘contextual identity’. Virtualisation allows us to ‘be’ different people in different places. Each of those personas is ‘real’ regardless of their existence in cyberspace or ‘IRL’. They are ‘real’ because they are an extension of who we are – we make them real because they are from us (arguably, part of our legacy of sharing in the task of creation when we named the animals) – and they are real because they have real consequences. Our virtual interactions with others will ultimately impact with a real person at the far end. We can be ‘different people’ on a night out with the lads or sitting in church on a Sunday morning and virtualisation has simply been an extension of that. But it offers greater scope for identity adoption and it often offers the veneer of anonymity and impermanence. It’s easier than ever to be whoever we want to be.

There are the obvious issues raised about ethical integrity and moral behaviour but I want to pick up on the issue of self-identity. When we adopt a contextual identity, whether it is who we are sitting in the pub, or our character in WoW, it is an extension of who we are. It cannot be otherwise, surely? That’s not to say that it necessarily represents a ‘significant’ part of who we are. It may be that tiny fraction of our personality that needs released every now and again for a bit of fun or it may be a large part of who we ‘are’ and what is important to us. The problem is that we are very bad at making relative judgements and tend towards the absolute. For example, I like to blog about systematic theology, therefore I must be an ‘academic’ with no understanding of real-life pastoral concerns. OK, bad example maybe. But joking aside, it’s an example of how one public persona could potentially be seen as representative of the whole person. Virtualisation compounds this problem with no discerning value-judgement being made on the ‘weight’ of each contextual identity. Added to that there is the possibility of many, many contextual identities and there may be little or no knowledge of the others from the one being looked at (and evaluated).

These issues are, arguably, purely sociological, and that would be true. But they do have a theological or faith dimension. Not least because some of those contextual identities may well representing a person’s faith, or ethics, or morals. But there is also the issue of ‘self’ and, from a Christian faith perspective, that is a theological issue.

Each of these contextual identities is real and so they are part of the real ‘us’ – they define who we are. Each aspect may represent a greater or smaller fraction of the whole, but they are nevertheless ‘us’. Furthermore, if we acknowledge that we are ‘fallen’ creatures then some (all) of those parts will be less than perfect. And it may well be that the ‘biggest’ aspect of us that is seen (virtually or otherwise, but especially virtually) is the least perfect.

And so integrity of ‘self’ becomes an issue. How de we ensure we are not misrepresented by those contextual identities and yet allow them to exist as part of who we are? But maybe that’s not our problem, but lies with others – how they perceive us, who they understand us to be given only the snapshots of us which appear in any given context. And therein lies another issue. We are not static beings. We grow, we learn, we change our minds, our views, our behaviour. Who we are is in a state of flux as we are moulded and shaped, brought down and raised back up again. Indeed the Christian belief in resurrection is not purely a future-focused one, but is a present reality as well. We are always in a time when we ‘die to self’ and become more Christ-like.

Therefore, the Christian understanding of forgiveness becomes all the more relevant as well. In many respects the internet is like a very large elephant – it never forgets. There is no shortage of websites where archive snapshots can be found of all manner of online mutterings are preserved for posterity. Any information we put ‘out there’ can be reused and further disseminated by others. Arguably it is no longer our own, but our fingerprints are still all over it. In a sense we cannot escape our virtual past and so our history, which is always bound into our sense of self, becomes more and more difficult to escape. But our past history, however influential on who we are now, is not who we are now. Christians, like everyone else, can be very good at dredging up the past but Christians should, out of anyone, be most aware of how that past can be set aside. If it were not so then Jesus stands for nothing and the cross is meaningless.

One final thought, and one that goes of on a bit of a tangent. Last Sunday evening I heard a sermon that got into a discussion of the nature of the Trinity. One picture offered was of a three-piece jigsaw, each part interlocking with the other two. It’s an unfortunate image in many respects, especially as the words used seemed to imply that each was ‘part’ of the whole and somehow lesser when ‘separated’. But in critiquing it we have the same issue of ‘self’ in the context of this discussion. We see these contextual identities somehow as individual parts of a jigsaw – not representative of the whole and incomplete without the rest of the pieces. But the problem is, like the relationship in the Trinity, there is no disconnectedness from the whole. Each piece may appear to exist in isolation, but that would be to misunderstand the nature of ‘self’. Each piece is shaped and formed by its relationship to the whole and so must contain some sense of the ‘whole’ within the ‘part’. But does that mean that we can extrapolate the ‘whole’ from the ‘part’? With the Godhead, yes, for it exists in perfect relationship. But for us, no, for our relationships, with one another and with ‘self’, are not perfect. But that, surely, is the challenge to who we are – to grow into better relationship and become more ‘integrated’. What, then, is the challenge to us for our contextual identity?

These are some of the things the seminar ought to have been addressing. Whether that’s the direction they are heading remains to be seen.

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Using video links, ministers will be able to contribute to services in vacant charges or be able to be seen simultaneously in a linked charge. The minister can rotate their visits so that they are there in person sometimes, but they can be seen and heard every Sunday.

I guess the idea has some merit – I have visions of rolling out of bed five minutes before the service, popping on a dog collar and switching on the webcam in the study. But I wonder when computer geeks will get round to creating a true virtual minister, and of course they could be pre-programmed to suit the theological temperament of the congregation.

How do you ordain software though?

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Web2.0 evangelists would have you believe that by making things, like the web, more interactive and with the ability to contribute then that is ‘a good thing’. Now, in a sense I don’t disagree. The ability to share information and knowledge is, I believe, a very good thing indeed. One of my own personal hobby-horses is theological education (it’s lacking and, what’s more, it’s getting drowned in a sea of voices usurping the language). The ability to educate, through technology has to be a good thing. But the big problem I see is that, whilst we are uneducated we are non-discriminatory. Everything becomes ‘valid’, information overload is a reality and rather than being turned on to education, many are turned off. “Just tell me what to think” becomes their mantra. In a Christian context this means not questioning economic policy, tolerating injustice or marginalising those who can’t cope.

The problem with technology is that it does those very things – it marginalises those who cannot understand or use it; it has an insatiable ‘upgrade’ appetite; it favours those who ‘have’. All of which are, or at least should be, anathema to the Christian community. But that doesn’t mean that technology is, in and of itself, ‘bad’; just that it needs to become more egalitarian and imaginative.

I believe that one of the fundamental works of the Christian church is to build ‘community’. Scripture’s repeated reporting of ‘God’s people’ isn’t an example of exclusivity, but an encouragement to be inclusive as we are, surely, all God’s children? Community means so much and it’s such a huge, all-encompassing term that I wouldn’t even attempt to define it here. In the discussion on Stewart’s blog, he suggest that the members of Second Life do have a sense of community. I’m sure they do, but the question is, is it a model of Christian community? I don’t think it is. It relies on pretending to be something/one else for a start. God accepts us as we are. Where is the irl (in real life) fellowship? Meeting virtually seriously undermines your opportunities to really get to know someone. How do you build a relationship of trust with someone you have never met? (And yes, I do note the implications of that statement with regards to a Christian’s faith in God, but that’s what the Trinity is all about). So, useful, yes. But certainly never a substitute for ‘real’ relationships. (Not that Stewart is suggesting technology should be, I hasten to add.)

But back to the earlier point of information v. knowledge. I was sitting in a waiting room the other day and the radio was on. It was the hourly news bulletin and a lady nearby was showing no particular interest until an report came on about a ‘celeb’ having been recently diagnosed with cancer. At this she cocked an ear, looked shocked and then somewhat sad. World events were of no consequence, but a ‘celeb’ with an illness was earth-shattering. But why was this even news? If you walk down the high street in any town you’ll pass a significant number of people with a terminal illness. None of them make the news. At best, such ‘news’ is information. But because it is presented as ‘news’ then we are trained to think of it as such. We become non-discriminatory and treat all information as of equal value. Then, inevitably, we ignore it because it eventually has no value.

Where’s this going? Stewart also mentioned that ‘tags’ are set to become a major aspect of how we deal with information. They certainly have the potential to be, but are just as readily open to abuse. Tags then become useless and we then rely on technologies to scrape information from web pages. Not so long ago Google got slammed for doing just that and searches for news ended up returning millions of blog pages and feed aggregators talking about the news and not the news itself. Where technology really needs to develop is in the processing of information. Or we have to become more intelligent and discriminatory in our finding and using information. And that brings us back to the point of needing to think for ourselves and to learn through interaction and so we’re back at community again.

As I said on Stewart’s blog, I don’t think technology is wrong, but I think we need to be a lot more imaginative in its use. In this respect I would entirely agree with his comment that it is through the creative misuse of it that will drive future development.

To address Stewart’s question, maybe what the church needs to do with technology isn’t so much jump on existing social media bandwagons but be a lot more creative in its thinking and drive new uses (misuses) of technology. But then that would require the church to be inventive and creative and radical and I think it would need to discover those things first (which it is doing in places). I think it has forgotten, in many respects, just how radical the Gospel is and should be.

Just to end on an ironic note. Earlier this week I was participating in a follow-up survey about e-learning being done by Dr Constantinos Athanasopoulos. He was most enthusiastic when he learned I use a blog for journalling (so if you’re dropping in from there, hello!). So I’m not a luddite really. I would just like to see technology used for the benefit of others rather than the promotion of some.

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