Marc AugĆ© (2011: 30ā31) hypothesizes that the second half of the twentieth century witnessed more radical scientific and technological changes than did the whole of the previous period since the birth of humanity. He then considers the twenty-first century and wonders if we should not now be studying even shorter periods of time, of perhaps ten or twenty years, in order to capture a similar breadth of rapid and critical social and cultural change initiated by radical innovations.
To illustrate the rapidity of change over the last twenty years, this introduction concentrates on three key examples. The first concerns the advancement of digital technology. In 1979, a 250 MB hard drive weighed 550 pounds and cost tens of thousands of dollars. In 2013, a 16 GB microSD card could hold the same amount of data as 64 of those twentieth-century hard drives, weighed less than a gram, and cost around ten dollars. Small, in this case, is not only beautiful, but also vastly more powerful. I am tempted to compare these advancements (although they have developed more quickly) to the progression from sailing across the oceans to flying above them. More people are now able to travel and at a faster pace, and this increased accessibility applies now also to information. This has important social and cultural implications. In line with Chap. 8ās exposition of the i-zation of society , I have to admit that I procured this information (prior to verification) from an Internet meme on Facebook (see Chap. 7).
The second example is more personal. In the 1980s, growing up in Belgium, I was using a personal computer free from any advertising and without an Internet connection. My parents would be watching television, with advertisements being shown both before and after a movie. Today, in Australia, I still use a personal computer, and used one to write this book. I listen to music (using this computer) via YouTube , and am bombarded with advertising not only before a full audio album butāand this appears to be a recent phenomenonābetween tracks as well. My generation Z son uses an iPad to watch YouTube and he is exposed to publicity as well. He is a fan of a series of video clips that involve children of his age detailing their everyday lives, including minute details of the toys, computer games, and theme parks that they use and visit. These clips do not seem to be officially sponsored by any company (brand) and they receive hits (views) numbering in the hundreds of thousands. I live in Sydney, and when my son was younger, he used to regularly tell my wife and me about Legoland in San Diego, as if we only had to drive to the next suburb to get there. He obtains information from this series of clips about the new games he wants, though he did not realize a few years ago that in order to download a game at the press of a button, a credit card number and authorization is required. And for parents, this is not a magical number for making games appear out of thin air!
For my last example, I reminisce about my past as a generation X teen. If, at night, I had a few drinks with my friends and we discussed buying something or the other, the shops would be closed at that time, and by the next morning, we would have most likely changed our minds. Some time ago, my generation Y children had some friends over and had a few drinks as well. They talked about buying some āonesiesā (a type of animal costume influenced by Japanese manga media), logged onto the Internet, and ordered them straightaway. A couple of days later, my wife and I began filling out forms acknowledging receipt of the various parcels that arrived. While most shops are closed at night, the Internet is open twenty-four hours a day and can be accessed from home. The consequences of this include this new level of inconspicuous consumption. Featherstone (2013) recently made reference to these new shopping spaces ābehindā their ubiquitous screens, where we can āclick and purchaseā, leaving traces that are used by companies to algorithmically predict what we, as consumers, might want to buy in the future (see Chap. 6).
Religion is also affected by these new technologies. For example, Richardson and Pardun (2015) discover that some generation Y Christians carry a Bible application (app) on their iPhones. This can be accessed in between reading sundry SMS messages or checking the latest pictures on Instagram . By tapping various key words, specific passages from the Bible are easy to find. Some of these religious actors even use this app to check if their minister is correctly making reference to the holy book during the church ceremony. However, the same app can be used for another and quite different purpose. In Mehta (2013), we discover atheists who enjoy using this easy access to sacred scriptures to point out misquotations of the Bible by religious adherents, helping them to demonstrate what they see as inconsistencies in this holy book. We will come back to the religious apps in Chap. 8. Suffice to state at the moment that religious practices are affected by these developments, as are all social and cultural practices.
These new technologies are an outcome of the advancement of science, but science has not replaced religion, as was believed, wrongly, before the advent of globalization. Indeed, Gilbert Achcar (2015) points out that a few centuries have now passed since the scientific revolution and that religion has survived the process of secularization instigated by the 1789 French Revolution. No matter how our technologies advance, or how independent from their God people become, or even how certain atheists declaim about Godās non-existence, religion continues to operate. A philosopher such as Nietzsche can ākillā God, but no philosopher or politician can get rid of religions; these are here to stay. Recent technological and scientific changes have not dispensed with religionsābut they have certainly impacted on them.
As these social and technological changes are affecting our lives, religions cannot remain āpristineā and apart from mundane matters. They have been standardized (Chap. 9) and greatly affected by a new level of calculative rationality (Chap. 10). These changes do not occur in a vacuum. They are driven by the extension of capitalism that is now fully established in the digital world (see Chap. 6). To understand how these new technologies are affecting religion, we also need to understand how neoliberalism (which is presented as a global civil religion in Chap. 11) is impacting on these technologies and on religion. The following section presents a short theoretical exploration of neoliberalism in order to ground the observations made above. This introduction then details the structure of the book and discusses the place of religion within the debates around it.
Neoliberalism
New technologies are not developed in a cultural void. They need to be supported, not only by people, but perhaps more importantly, by a structure and a culture. Leonardo da Vinci, it must be remembered, never commodified his great inventions. This was not because they were anti-religious, but because the spirit of capitalism, as detailed by Max Weber, did not exist in his lifetime. This came later, in the sixteenth century (see Appendix 1), and has developed into what is now called āneoliberalismā.
In the twenty-first century, personal observations such as those I provide above are strengthened by the academic study of hegemonic neoliberalism. According to Raewyn Connell and Nour Dados (see also Connell 2014),
Indeed, the goal of neoliberalism is to extend existing markets and to create new ones where they do not already exist (Connell 2014), and as is shown in Chap. 6, this goal has been extended to the digital world as well. In its simplest form, neoliberalism is a rhetoric about small governments and the free market (Cahill et al. 2012). It requires a floating currency market, a reduction of trade barriers, the privatization of the public sector, and the deregulation of industries. It also calls for a āNew Public Managementā by which the public sector is pushed to operate in the same fashion as the private sector. It is known as āThatcherismā in the United Kingdom, āReaganomicsā in the United States, āeconomic rationalismā in Australia, and āeconomic fundamentalismā in New Zealand. This āmarket thinkingā not only penetrates communities and families, it also affects the individual (Connell and Dados 2014).[w]e live in a world of markets, we are constantly told, and have to do what markets require. Modern subjectivity is about selling the self, creating marketable narratives for Facebook , YouTube , and the next employer. Corporations not only buy and sell in markets. But they also create internal markets and profit centres, and constitute their workers as mini-firms, contractors. Government itself has to act like a firm, scale down debt, sell off unprofitable assets, lure foreign capital, and make a financial surplus. The modern university has to find a new business model, to become entrepreneurial, to produce what the market wants. (2014: 5)
Connell questions the idea that neoliberalism is a single doctrine and has thus focused her research on historical shifts in the ideology and practice of this ostensibly hegemonic force. Part of her work focuses on the birth of neoliberalism in Latin America, before the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I would like to continue in this spirit of revisionism by bringing to the present two key theories that emerged during the time that Thatcher and Reagan were world leadersāthose of Fredric Jameson (Chaps 6 and 7) and George Ritzer (Chaps. 8 and 7)āand adapting them to our post-communist societies and to the contemporary world, arguably led by people such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Facebookās Marc Zuckerberg. This new era marks an importan...