Rethinking relationships in cyberspace

ABSTRACT

The ubiquity of the internet, which has been extensively theorised in the social sciences, provides, for some, a radically new context in which we must rethink both the significance and the performance of being human. For others, the internet is an extension rather than revision of our pre-existing practices, meaning that what it is to be human remains largely unchanged. This is a stimulating and pressing context for theological anthropological reflection: theological doctrines do not specifically address cyberspace, but they suggest idea(l)s of being human that are, on the one hand, enduring and yet can also be read as flexible for different contexts. What, then, are the challenges and promises that digital contexts pose for models of theological anthropology, specifically ones that highlight the significance of human relationships? Do digital contexts overstretch idea(l)s of human nature? On what grounds can we assess and reflect on our conduct in cyberspace?

KEYWORDS:

• Theological anthropology
• digital culture
• posthumanism
• relational theory
• internet studies
• online community

Introduction: the digital context

In recent years, digital spaces have become largely ubiquitous, and many of us now conduct large parts of our lives online. In more recent months, digital spaces have become vital places for people to go about their working and daily lives, following global responses to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that promoted self-isolation. Where people have had to remain at home, the internet has been an important platform for sociality and connecting with others to an extent that we had not yet experienced, in spite of the growing popularity and functionality of digital technologies. Indeed, internet access in the UK came to be recognised as more of an essential utility alongside electricity, gas, and water.¹ As people adjusted to daily life in the context of a global pandemic, so too did it become necessary to adjust to an increased reliance on digital spaces.

Of course, that is not to say that digital spaces are entirely new: although the size and scale of the shift to using internet technologies to connect with others in the context of the coronavirus pandemic is significant, such technologies have long been creeping into parts of our daily domestic and working lives. Whether it is communicating with one’s family about arrangements for dinner, teaching students, participating in discussions, dating, sharing the details of one’s life or participating in church – the digital realm, for a number of years now, has been a place in which human relationships increasingly happen, or at least are supplemented.

For our context, then, which encompasses the past few decades but resonates particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, we cannot think about human relationships without recognition of the importance of the digital as part of that context. This is a point that we highlight in this special issue: one way or another, the internet is an important part of our sociality in contemporary times, and as such it impacts our relationships. It is difficult to ascertain consensus, though, on the character or extent of this impact. Are digital spaces inherently different from their non-digital counterparts? Do digital technologies inevitably transform the nature and of our relationships, or just the expression of them? Are these transformations for better or for worse? As we suggest in this introduction, the ways that we approach the topic of cyberspace impact our responses to these questions in terms of our perceptions of the impact of the internet on our human relationships.

In particular, we note the significance of these questions and explorations for theology. Relationships are central to all aspects of Christian doctrine and practice; from the relationality of the Trinity to following Christ’s example of neighbourliness with others, we see that models of relationships are prominent in Christian traditions. Indeed, according to Christian teachings, humans are made in the image of a loving and relational God (imago dei), and so relationships are foundational to understandings of what it is to be human that are associated with theological anthropology.² How technologies and the digital context impact our expressions of humanness through our relationships and engagement with others, then, is an important question for Christians. Whether (and if so, how) such technologies interrupt or hinder our relationships with others is a matter which has ramifications for the flourishing of individuals, communities, and humans more generally – all of which, according to Christian teachings, bear God’s image in some way. In this special issue, the contributors acknowledge the importance of relationships for Christian anthropology as well as their impact on other aspects of Christian faith, including community and ecclesiology, compassion and neighbourliness, and eschatology and soteriology.

In this introductory article, we provide the reader with a general orientation to these themes by way of sketching out an overview of some of the key points of overlap between theories and theologies of cyberspace. Our discussion focuses on the rationale for the special issue, namely the need to rethink relationships in cyberspace as a result of these interdisciplinary explorations.

Beginning with a brief outline of the theological contours of some of the general approaches to cyberspace and perceptions of the relationships that we find there (or the lack thereof), we then explore attitudes to relationships and relationality in theology and critical theory in further detail. We show how it is possible to use themes that emerge from relational theory, such as materiality and entanglements, to rethink relationships in cyberspace, which subsequent articles then articulate further. Finally, in introducing the articles, we note the overarching themes of community and hopefulness that span across all contributions to this special issue in various ways. Communities and hope, we suggest, emerge as ways of articulating a Christian critique and contribution to the need to rethink relationships in cyberspace.

Dis/connection, dualisms, and the digital: theorising and theologising cyberspace

Cyberspace was once a sci-fi fantasy that was famously described by William Gibson as “a consensual hallucination.”³ It was considered as a distinctive realm that humans “jacked into” or entered, and this attitude was culturally reinforced through the modem beeps and dial tones that marked our transition from the so-called “real” world to the “digital” one. Domestic and consumer access to the internet in the 1990s required the performance of a user-initiated hardware and software ritual, and it felt notably like an activity in and of itself. Films like The Matrix, The Congress, and Ready Player One have all reinforced these ideas of virtual- and cyber-spaces as providing a kind of escapism from the real world. And, most recently, virtual reality technologies carry the torch of ideas of the digital as a distinctively immaterial space.

However, the treatment of cyberspace as distinctive from the “real” world has always resonated more so with our mythological and popular cultural imaginary than with everyday practices and lived experiences. Philosophers and cultural theorists such as Margaret Wertheim, Michael Heim, Erik Davis, and others have noted the “ontological continuity [between] the Platonic knowledge of ideal forms [and] the information systems of the matrix.”⁴ As Heim goes on to say,

In both, Eros inspires humans to outrun the drag of the ‘meat’ – the flesh – by attaching human attention to what formally attracts the mind. As Platonists and Gnostics down through the ages have insisted, Eros guides us to Logos.⁵

Here, Heim highlights the eros-based and dualistic desires for liberation from the entanglements and vulnerability that are associated with our corporeality. The disembodied logos is the apotheosis of such desires, which informs how humans experience a tension with their environments and surroundings; they are seen, as Davis puts it, as “strangers in a strange land.”⁶ For the Gnostic, then, cyberspace and the turn to information that allows us to seemingly circumvent many bodily and physical limitations fulfils the dreams of transcendence,⁷ and is where they can feel more “at home”.

Given the turn away from embodiment, though, which makes cyberspace feel somewhat incongruent to and detached from everyday life, participating in online experiences has also in practice been perceived as being inferior to the “real life” experience. For example, “performances of rituals or pilgrimages online are often doubted as being a mere simulation or a reproduction of something ‘real,’ rather than being authentic as such.”⁸ In digital spaces, people are seen as disembodied.⁹ This disembodiment in digital spaces seems to be at odds with a Christian life that is founded on the historical materiality of the Incarnation and prioritises incarnational relationships.¹⁰ Douglas Groothuis argues that the internet dehumanises us through a lack of personal presence:

An important theological question is: How disembodied should our communication be? The Internet distributes information widely and quickly, but in a merely electronic form, which lacks the personal presence at the heart of biblical discipleship, fellowship, and worship. When cyberspace begins to replace embodied interactions, we fail to honor the incarnational nature of Christianity.¹¹

David Kelsey raises a similar concern when he asks “[A]re virtual space and virtual presence adequate media for communication among personal organic bodies, or is ‘virtual’ just a euphemism for ‘bodiless’?”¹²

This apparent concern for the body an intriguing one, particularly when it is situated in the context of a Christian tradition that has, at times, had little positive concern for the material body, preferring instead the immaterial and spiritual. Christian attitudes to the body are complex and have shifted variously throughout history. At times, the body has been loathed as irksome, sinful, fleshly, and earthly. Spiritual development has been found in practices that denied the flesh and prioritised the mind or the soul – pilgrimage, fasting, shriving, abstinence.¹³ The “real” you was the immaterial part of you. You were not your body. Yet Christianity, we see, also has an important incarnational tradition of highlighting the importance of embodied, creaturely experiences in ways that may at least begin to challenge some perceptions of logocentrism. As David Meconi writes,

Because God’s image is found in creation, creation not only matters, it becomes our only way back to God. That is what the incarnation is essentially about: once the perfect imprint and image became human, no image could ever come back to God now except through the human.¹⁴

Although some scholars dispute the anthropocentrism of these kinds of claims – and this, as we will shortly see, can be linked to developments in relational theory – the importance of our own creatureliness, including our vulnerability and mortality as exemplified through the person of Christ, is certainly to be noted. Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo describes this incarnational emphasis as informing a theological anthropology that celebrates our “fleshly, relational, ambiguous, and vulnerable bodies.”¹⁵ Against this understanding, perceptions of cyberspace that speak excessively of liberation and escapism at the expense of relations are likely to be regarded as un-Christian.¹⁶

As the internet has become more ubiquitous and more embedded in society, though, we find that it is about relationships and sociality. Barry Wellman was among the first theorists to acknowledge this, as he recalls saying at a 1992 computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) conference:

You don’t understand! The future is not in writing stand-alone applications for small groups. It is in understanding that computer networks support the kinds of social networks in which people usually live and often work. […] Moreover, people don’t just relate to each other online, they incorporate their computer mediated communication into their full range of interaction: in-person, phone, fax, and even writing.¹⁷

Wellman pre-empted the ways that digital spaces would allow users to engage in relational networks. We see this particularly in contemporary trends and practices, where families and lovers are increasingly likely to be dispersed, perhaps even globally, or trying to juggle busy lives and non-synchronous availabilities, or, as we have seen recently as a result of responses to the Coronavirus pandemic, in lockdown, and the technology is available to allow people to continue their relationships. Digital technologies to this end are the latest iterations of the ways that humans have always utilised the latest technologies to enhance relationships, whether that was via letters, telegrams, or telephones. Indeed, such are the continuities between relationship-sustaining interactions, both online and offline interactions, and such is the ubiquity of internet technologies, that it no longer seems fitting to describe a clear-cut separation between so-called “online” and “offline” spaces. The distinctions between the two have largely eroded as we pick up conversations and interactions between the two, making references to and uses of online and offline spaces simultaneously.

However, as Wellman goes on to state, there is a caveat to the types of relationships that he anticipates are cultivated across computer-mediated spaces: “These social networks are not the densely-knit, isolated small groups that groupware tries to support. They are sparsely-knit, far-reaching networks, in which people relate to shifting relationships and communities.”¹⁸ While Wellman is clear in asserting that the internet is about relationships, which is an important point for subsequent internet studies and for our purposes here, he is equally clear that the infrastructure of the internet is likely to imply different types of relationships to their offline counterparts. To this end, many sociologists and internet theorists have emphasised how, at both a macro and a micro level, digital technologies “are reworking hierarchies, changing social divisions, creating possibilities and opportunities, informing us, and reconfiguring our relations with objects, spaces and each other.”¹⁹ This optimism in particular about “Web 2.0” is rooted in how the internet facilitates more fluid forms of communication among users that, for the most part, traverse spatial limitations. Consequently, as David Lyon writes, internet technologies “contribute to the establishment of novel contexts of social interaction,”²⁰ albeit ones where “people are able to relate in more and more fragmentary ways.”²¹ While there are benefits to these fragmentary relations as suggested above, they of course also can be a double-edged sword insofar as they may have “a profound impact on how community is understood. In one sense it is highly individualistic.”²²

Many theorists have discussed the ways that the infrastructure of the internet lends itself to the cultivation of individual-centred interactions. From the algorithms that provide a tailored online shopping experience by recommending purchases, to those that filter the information that we can access when we (even just begin to, in the case of autofill) type our queries into Google, digital technologies are designed to be user-friendly. This becomes a notable concern when we consider the user as a monad or an atomised individual. It is not necessarily that digital spaces are not conducive to relationships – social media remains one of the most popular uses of the internet²³ – but rather that they have a tendency to prioritise the individual. We can see this in how our digital social lives, too, are conditioned by algorithms that work behind the scenes to declutter and streamline our newsfeeds, weeding out information that it deems irrelevant to, or undermining of, our desired experiences. Indeed, this algorithmic infrastructure has led to concerns such as that voiced by Michael Raubach, for whom “a virtual community is […] no longer a communion where ‘two or more are gathered’, but only a single self – enclosed in the mirrored walls of curated algorithms.”²⁴ While Raubach’s comment may somewhat overstate the matter, the unique ways that we are able to curate our experiences and encounters in cyberspace (contra so-called “offline” spaces) may reduce our exposure to otherness. This is a point that warrants further consideration, but for now it is worth noting as part of the methodological and theoretical challenges that are faced when exploring relationships in cyberspace. What assumptions and perspectives about human relationships and the infrastructure of the internet are affirmed and challenged in different approaches to digital relationships?

Reflecting on these challenges in light of the discussion thus far, we are brought to ask: How can we account for, on the one hand, the continuities of “online” and “offline” practices and the hand-off of relationships that take place simultaneously across different platforms, and on the other hand, the particularity of digital spaces and the types of discontinuous interactions and relationships that they can facilitate? This is one of the key questions that internet theorists must consider. Accounting for these kinds of relations – among and between humans and technologies – can enable us to then explore the ensuing ethical questions about the outcomes of such relationships. Whose interests do they serve? Do they contribute to the flourishing of selves and/or others? Do they edify communities? In this special issue, we relate these questions to the anthropological themes of humanness and humaneness, which correspond to the broader Christian theological themes of hope and community. Before introducing these in more detail, we provide a brief overview of how we might consider the complexities of continuous and discontinuous relationships that characterise our experiences of digital spaces by way of an exploration of relational theory and a critical examination of human relationships.

Relationships and relationalities: the relational and the digital turn

Increasingly, relationships are at the fore of academic attention, particularly associated with the interdisciplinary work of critical theory. Specifically, relationality encapsulates a broad set of approaches that advocate the importance of connections between phenomena in order to make sense of them. Unsurprisingly, it has gained the most traction in social theory, where “relational sociologists pay attention to the specific relations from which societies, social inequalities, deviancy and so forth emerge, are transformed or disappear.”²⁵ Relational sociology aligns perhaps most closely with micro sociology, which emphasises how society is the composition of relations among individuals, yet it does not disregard the contributions of macro sociology, which explores how social structures impose themselves upon individuals and condition their attitudes and behaviours. As Riccardo Prandini comments,

What catalysed this ‘relational turn’ was the critique of well-established ‘individualistic-collectivistic’ ontologies and methodologies that characterised sociology until the early 1970s. […] For ‘relationists’ both the individual and the social are important determinants of Y, X, and Z. The individual is ‘social(ized)’, and the social is interiorized by individuals; they are made by the same stuff, ‘relationships’.²⁶

The aims of this relational turn in social theory are to emphasise relationships in order to account for the ways that social reality is “dynamic, continuous, and processual.”²⁷ Theories that foreground either the social self (the individual) or the social-structural, according to proponents of relational theory, often fail to do justice to these realities. Contrariwise, these advocates point out that relational theory is uniquely able to handle the complexity of social life and relations at a range of levels, which in turn allows for more accurate and valid insights into the social world.

Indeed, the ability of relational theory to encompass a range of levels underwrites its merits and uses in other fields and disciplines in addition to the sociological. Relational theory advocates “the seeing together […] of what before had been seen in separations and held severally apart,”²⁸ and this includes not only individuals and social structures, but also contexts, ideas, and even disciplines. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that relational theory has led to the development of new paradigms and approaches in psychotherapy, geography, biology, design and engineering, management and organisation studies, and data management.

Christianity, which speaks of a range of levels between (and among) creatures and God, is also no stranger to some of the key principles of relational theory. The doctrine of the Trinity embodies relational principles insofar as the relation of the three persons in hypostatic union defines some Christian understandings of the singular God. Admittedly, the complications of this doctrine have been long debated throughout church history and have resulted in schisms and denominations such as Unitarianism, Monarchianism, and other nontrinitarian positions. The issue of the relationality of the godhead becomes further problematic when we consider in addition to this the relationship between God and humans who were made in his (or their)²⁹ image. For advocates of Trinitarian anthropology, the doctrine that humans were made in the image of a relational God enables us to recognise the complexity and multiplicity of our identities that are comprised of a range of entanglements with others. F. LeRon Shults, who writes in favour of a relational theological anthropology, expands on this:

The lack of attention to the robust trinitarian personal relations in the Augustinian and early modern Protestant models of God let to a picture of an infinitely intelligent and powerful Subject who is intent on self-glorification. […] As John’s Gospel makes clear, the glory of God is not about the self-glorification of an autonomous divine Individual but about the mutual glorification of the three persons of the Trinity.³⁰

Shults’ affirmation of the Trinity becomes a theological way of grounding and recognising the kind of relationality advocated by social scientists, quantum physicists, and critical theorists, as we have seen. It also highlights the importance of humility as a result of the entanglements that shape us: human welfare and flourishing is not separable from non-humans or to be considered in a vacuum, but is relationally bound up with the flourishing of others.

And yet, for some commentators, relational theory challenges fundamental aspects of theological anthropology given that,

in keeping with much of the Christian tradition (elevating the notion of substance and its properties), the intuition of substance still has a crucial role to play, for example, in distinguishing God from his creation and man from other created entities.³¹

Substance-based understandings of imago dei are instructive for establishing human discreteness and uniqueness, which are important tenets for both theological and non-theological understandings of human nature.³² The fixity of notions of humanness, which has been assumed in many interpretations of imago dei and its secular corollaries, is deconstructed and undermined by arguments from relational theory that identify humans as defined through fluid and unstable connections that extend beyond the category of the “human”. As David Kirchhoffer notes, “we are so fundamentally bound up in an infinite network of relationships […] that to even conceive of some sort of objective self or human essence verges on the absurd.”³³

Kirchhoffer’s comments about the relational entanglements that prefigure and comprise agents find resonance with Karen Barad’s relational approach to theoretical physics – a field already familiar with notions of relativity. For Barad, in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway, everything is entangled, which

is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. […] Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.³⁴

Barad’s relational approach to matter undoes the fixity and discreteness of different objects, entities, and phenomena: everything is understood as processual and is in a process of becoming as shaped and reshaped by the interactions and intra-actions – the relations – that constitute and reveal it.

This leads Barad to develop an account of the way that agency is performed and understood only through relations,³⁵ which is a move that resonates with critical theorists such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, who have each called attention to the material and conceptual entanglements that come to define (as well as trouble) us. Latour challenges the modernist myth that humans are defined through the binarization of nature and culture, noting that “all of culture and all of nature get churned up again every day.”³⁶ Technology plays a key role in this blurring of boundaries between nature and culture. This is a point that takes further prominence in Haraway’s work; for Haraway, “insofar as we know ourselves in both formal discourse and in daily practice, we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras.”³⁷ Haraway argues that we are cyborgs in the sense that we are defined by relations, especially with technologies, that prefigure our identities. Importantly, these are not relations of choice, but they are part of the contexts that condition and enable our choices. Admittedly, the cyborg figure can also suggest a human-technology relationship that is consciously pursued (even if only implicitly) by the human. Paul Teusner, for example, asks, “Are you not a Cyborg the moment your hand is on your mouse?”³⁸ Haraway, however, interprets the cyborg not as the product of an active engagement with technology, but rather as a hybrid, relational figure that is the precondition for making sense of our actions. The difference is subtle yet significant: Haraway’s cyborg does not presume the otherness of technologies, which is likely to impact our assessment of them when considering relationships in digital spaces.

Before relating these points to cyberspace, it is worth taking stock here of what we have established from a brief discussion of relational theory. Most pertinent is how relationalities are understood, which suggests something discernible from – yet notably related to – relationships. Relationalities correspond to our ontology by highlighting the entanglements that comprise and prefigure us. For relational theorists, these entanglements encompass the nonhuman as well as the human, as they include nonhuman life forms and technologies. To emphasise the relational is to de-emphasise the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. Relationships, juxtaposed against these understandings of relationalities, can more specifically refer to what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a connection formed between two or more people or groups based on social interactions and mutual goals, interests, or feelings.”³⁹ To the extent that relationships involve active participation, they resonate more with our ethical sensibilities. That is, of course, not to say that we don’t find relationships with technologies in digital spaces that we are to be ethically mindful of – we turn to such relationships in the next section – but rather that it is also possible to think of relations in non-optional ways, and these relationalities can have a bearing on some of the relationships that we engage in.

Cyborgs and cyberspace: a framework for flourishing?

Technologies, as we have seen briefly in the contrasts between Haraway’s and Teusner’s interpretations of the cyborg figure, can be understood vis-à-vis the human both in terms of relationalities and relationships. Haraway uses the cyborg to talk about the non-optional entanglements with technologies that should impel us to rethink our assumptions about what it is to be human; Teusner considers how we become cyborgs given our optional use of technologies as an outworking of our choices. Teusner’s comments are part of a broader genealogy of thinking about technology as what media theorist Marshall McLuhan termed, in troublingly yet tellingly gendered language, “extensions of man.”⁴⁰ Haraway herself highlights and critiques this androcentric tradition, where technologies fulfil tasks for human ends, in her Cyborg Manifesto: “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”⁴¹ Here, as Haraway goes on to say, “perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos.”⁴² For Haraway, technologies are not simply neutral outworkings of human power, although this is the dominant way that they have been figured.

To be sure, both figurations of cyborgs share in common an apprehension and critique of the general invisibility of technologies. Both Haraway and Teusner recognise that our relationalities with technologies, and our relationships through them (where technologies are seen as means to human ends), have a tendency to direct our attention to the human relationships rather than the technological. Indeed, as anthropologist Sherry Turkle – who has written on human-technology interactions for decades – observes, we only notice technologies when they “go wrong” and when their malfunctioning actually inhibits relationships.⁴³ As all cyborg theorists have shown, though, whether our relations with technologies are optional or not, technologies should not be recognised as passive mediators of human relationships. In the context of cyberspace, this point can help us to reflect on the ways that multimedia messaging can enrich communication while also perhaps placing different demands and expectations on users to decipher exchanged information. One way of expressing these troubling relations is, as Linda Cundy suggests, by recognising how “technology is now a third element in two-person relationships, mediating the exchange of information and the expression of our needs, desires, love, and hate. It brings us together, yet many also find these changes alienating, dehumanising.”⁴⁴ This framing of the matter can help us to consider the benefits and limitations of both optional and non-optional relationships and relationalities with technologies, in more of their richness and complexity.

By making our various entanglements with technologies more visible, which includes relations with and through devices, we can begin to better examine how technologies comprise our identities while also reflecting our values and desires. To this end, although relationalities correspond to the non-optional entanglements that comprise our ontological condition as humans or indeed as cyborgs, the ways that these entanglements shape our designs and uses of technologies have ethical ramifications. Haraway, for example, uses the relational, hybrid cyborg figure ironically to expose and challenge the ways that technologies, rather than threatening our humanness, are typically designed to impose norms that are predicated on a limited understanding of the human subject,⁴⁵ which can result in ableism, misogyny, heteronormativity, racism, colonialism, and other forms of marginalisation.⁴⁶ Here, we find that technologies, as relational, can embody biases (contrary to claims to their neutrality) similarly to the ways that people can. To provide but a few examples, consider how smart assistants routinely perpetuate gender norms by using gendered voices;⁴⁷ how devices such as cochlear implants are designed to condition differently-abled bodies by ensuring that they meet a “baseline” level of health, regardless of the sense of community that deaf people say they find valuable;⁴⁸ and how algorithms in judicial and banking systems have been found to promulgate racial biases and discriminate against people based on limited data, at an alarming and previously undetected rate.⁴⁹ These norms can clearly detriment our relationships and the flourishing of others and ourselves. Technologies that are predicated on limited understandings of humanness, we might say, are likely to detriment expressions of our humaneness.

Rethinking our relationships in cyberspace, then, can involve making visible our complex entanglements with technologies, as well as reflecting on and becoming aware of the ways that technologies both condition and express our humanness. The cyborg has been suggested as a versatile figure to consider such relationalities and relationships, but it is also important to note the various critiques that have been made of that figure, including by Christian theologians, as these critiques are likely to influence how we assess different relations – with other people and with technologies – in cyberspace. Does the cyborg, for example, too readily embrace its technological complicity at the expense of its humanness? For Haraway, “the cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”⁵⁰ Such a statement has led many to voice concern about how the cyborg (or indeed the posthuman) is anti-Christian, or at least anti-human,⁵¹ and this espouses hostility towards overreliance on technologies. Illustrating this point, recent Ofcom research reveals that “most people in the UK are dependent on their digital devices and need a constant connection to the internet”⁵² – this “dependence” indicates technological relationships that could be harmful for users, as the framing of a “dependent relationship” suggests that we disempower ourselves at the hands of our technologies. This is part of a broader cultural narrative about fears that the technological will erase or detriment the human. Sherry Turkle, for example, voices this in critique of a predicament where people will increasingly seek more from machines and less from each other.⁵³ The assumption behind such claims is that relationships with technologies are fundamentally different from relationships with humans; as Midson has discussed elsewhere, only the latter are typically perceived to involve encounters with “otherness” whereas technologies tend to be figured as lifeless objects that can only reflect – or be projected onto by – oneself.⁵⁴ Of course, if arguments from relational theory are to be upheld, and humans and technologies are more entangled than such concerns suggest, then it may be possible and in fact necessary to rethink the non-optional as well as optional ways that technologies condition and connect us.

In the context of cyberspace, acknowledging these points can set a precedent for thinking about the ways that online and digital spaces are both continuous and discontinuous with so-called “offline” ones. It can instruct us to think about the impacts that our assumptions about human nature, human relationships, and the alleged nature of technologies have on the ways that we navigate and make choices in cyberspace. It can help us to reflect on the goals and desires that we use to assess and evaluate our complex myriad of relations. It can remind us that cyberspace is not an ethereal realm, as technologies and relationalities – as Barad, Latour, Haraway, and others remind us – have important material aspects. As such, bodies, and thus relationships between these bodies, can be read as flexible for different contexts, and flesh can be read as something that stretches into these digital spaces. None of this should necessarily mean for theology (among other disciplines) a strong embrace of cyberspace, and certainly not a wholesale rejection of digital technologies. It rather is intended to provide a toolkit that can help us to make sense of our ontology and ethics in complex spaces. The need to rethink our relationships in cyberspace, we propose, is an open-ended task, and it is an important one for our times.

Reflecting and rethinking: Theology, relationships, cyberspace

What, then, are the challenges and promises that digital and online contexts pose for models of imago dei and theological anthropology, specifically ones that highlight the significance of human relationships? Do digital and online contexts overstretch idea(l)s of human nature? On what grounds can we assess and reflect on our conduct in cyberspace?

It is this context and these kinds of questions that we posed to our four contributors to this special issue of Theology and Sexuality. All four of the contributors have researched and written about digital spaces in a variety of different contexts and different theological interests, and so each of them has taken a different approach to the question of (re)thinking relationships in cyberspace.

Jana Bennett has previously written Aquinas on the Web in which she argues for a dialogue between theology and Web 2.0 in the aim of thinking about how we might do theology in the age of the internet.⁵⁵ Here she notes that the internet and digital spaces often bring out the worst in people and argues that bringing Christian practices into digital spaces might help to combat some of these worst tendencies (as indeed they do in non-digital contexts) with the aim of bringing about reconciliation and justice in human relationships.

Bennett’s sense of hope rooted in the relationship between Christianity and cyberspace touches on a theme, namely hopefulness, that runs throughout the articles in this volume. Stephen Garner, whose work on the cyborg and hybridity has always had a hopeful theme,⁵⁶ specifically addresses the place of hope in virtual contexts. Here he queries the ways in which digital technologies shape how we think about human bodies, gender, sexuality, identity and relationships and considers the ways in which traditional Christian categories of incarnation and sin might function in the world of digital technology. Garner argues that we can reconfigure what it means to be embodied in these digital contexts and that the relational solidarity technology offers might foreshadow the new eschaton. To this end, Garner argues that technology might facilitate Christian hope and offer a foreshadowing of the eschatological hope at the heart of the Christian faith.

More broadly, the theme of hope and hopefulness runs throughout the articles in this volume. Bennett is hopeful that bringing Christian prayerful practices into digital spaces might ameliorate the worst instincts of the human to dehumanise the other in these spaces. Thompson is hopeful that learning to pay attention to those we encounter in digital spaces might offer a reconsideration of the supposed inferior nature of the online and give opportunity for genuine interaction and communion to take place. Herzfeld offers a hopeful vision of authentic relationships in digital contexts and a hope that God would be present amongst those who gather there.

In some ways, this hope is reactive. Those who spend their time in digital spaces can already attest to the power and potential of Christian liturgical and theological practice online. Those who engage openly and honestly in the digital realm know full well that many of the relationships they develop there are genuine, authentic, and incarnational. As is often the case, theology is playing catch up to the reality of Christian practice. So rather than offering a hopeful vision of what might be, these articles offer an outline of what is, a present that brings with it future hope.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Scott Midson is Lecturer in Liberal Arts at The University of Manchester, and prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate based at the Lincoln Theological Institute, where he began researching machines and theological reflection on love as part of a three year project, “Living with and Loving Machines”. The outcomes of this research to date have been published by journals including the Journal for Posthuman Studies and Sophia; as an edited collection (Love, Technology and Theology, published by T&T Clark); and in various other volumes. Scott’s work in the field of theology and posthumanism has also been published by I.B.Tauris (Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology and God).

Karen O'Donnell is the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Spirituality at Sarum College, Salisbury. She has published research on spiritual formation in digital spaces as well as research into digital pedagogy for theological education. She has also published various articles on theological anthropology and digital technologies. Karen’s work on trauma and theology has been published by SCM Press (Broken Bodies: The Eucharist, Mary and the Body in Trauma Theology and Feminist Trauma Theologies).

Notes

1. P. A. Media, “Broadband Providers to Lift Data Caps during Covid-19 Lockdown”.

2. Cortez, Theological Anthropology.

3. Gibson, Neuromancer, 59.

4. Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 88.

5. Ibid., 88.

6. Davis, TechGnosis.

7. Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 249.

8. Radde-Antweiler, “Authenticity,” 88.

9. Campbell and MacKay, “The Internet as Social-Spiritual Space,” 217.

10. To be sure, it is also possible to critique the eros-based aims of cyberspace that are identified by Heim and others, on the grounds of their claims to transcendence as well as their denigration of the material. This is the approach taken by theologians such as Jay Y. Kim, who argues for the church’s need to enable genuine transcendence in human communities (Analog Church, 12), and Graham Ward, who challenges the inauthentic forms of transcendence that we find in digital culture (Cities of God, 118). Although we do not discuss transcendence explicitly or in detail here, we acknowledge the importance of these discussions for rethinking relationships in cyberspace through a discussion of approaches to relations and communities.

11. Groothuis, “Losing Our Souls in Cyberspace,” 54.

12. Kelsey, “Spiritual Machines, Personal Bodies, and God,” 9.

13. Dupont, “Food, Gender, and Sexuality,” 83. See also Rom 8.13 and Col 3.5.

14. Meconi, “The Dual Functionality of the Imago Dei,” 205.

15. Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 228.

16. Peter Scott identifies an analogy of the incarnation in how “the human is disclosed in and through its attachments, and human emancipations require specific entanglements with objects rather than freedom from them” (Anti-Human Theology, 88). Scott’s position suggests and pre-empts a relational perspective that we explore further in a later section of this article. In short, cyberspace can never fulfil the eros-based and logocentric dreams that underwrite its roots in sci-fi and popular culture, because any such escapism and denial of ‘fleshly’ entanglements necessitate technological entanglements that are otherwise rendered invisible. We touch on this in relation to the cyborg figure here; for more on this figure, see Midson, Cyborg Theology, 93–106.

17. Wellman, “Studying the Internet Through the Ages,” 17.

18. Ibid.

19. Beer and Burrows, “Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0,” 67.

20. Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 13.

21. Ibid., 14.

22. Savage et al., Making Sense of Generation Y, 147.

23. Smart Insights, “Global Social Media Research Summary 2020”.

24. Raubach, “Politics in the Cyber-City,” 83.

25. François Dépelteau, “Relational Thinking in Sociology”, 4.

26. Prandini, “Relational Sociology”, 3.

27. Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology”, 281. Emirbayer was among the first to crystallise and formalise proposals for a sociological relational turn in this well-cited manifesto.

28. Dewey and Bentley, cited in ibid. [Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology”], 287.

29. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom of God.

30. Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology, 240.

31. Farris, “A Substantive (Soul) Model of the Imago Dei,” 177.

32. Moritz, “Evolutionary Biology and Theological Anthropology,”45. See also Midson, Cyborg Theology, 27–32, 65–70; Cortez, Theological Anthropology, 14–40.

33. Kirchhoffer, “Turtles All the Way Down?”, 185.

34. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, ix.

35. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 131–41.

36. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 2.

37. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 177.

38. Teusner, “New Thoughts on the Status of the Religious Cyborg,” 3.

39. OED Online, “relationship, n.”

40. McLuhan, Understanding Media.

41. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 154.

42. Ibid., 173. It is also significant to note here the challenges that Haraway’s cyborg poses for some, particularly logocentric, understandings of theological anthropology, which we touch on in this introduction (for more detailed exploration of this, see Midson, Cyborg Theology).

43. Turkle, The Second Self; Turkle, Life on the Screen.

44. Cundy, “Introduction,” xiv.

45. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 150–51.

46. Cf. Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism; Braidotti, The Posthuman.

47. Rawlinson, “Digital Assistants like Siri”.

48. Cooper, “Hear Me Out,”, 469–71.

49. Huq, “Racial Equity in Algorithmic Criminal Justice,” 92; Shane, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.

50. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 151.

51. Waters, Christian Moral Theology in the Emerging Technoculture; Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God.

52. Ofcom, “A Decade of Digital Dependency.”

53. Turkle, Alone Together.

54. Midson, “Introduction: Techne, Agape, and Eros”, pp. 13–14.

55. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web?.

56. Garner, “The Hopeful Cyborg,” 87–100.