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Believing in the Net Believe in the net: Implicit religion and the internet hype, 1994-2001 Pärna, K. Citation Pärna, K. (2010, January 28). Believe in the net: Implicit religion and the internet hype, 1994-2001. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/14622 Version: Not Applicable (or Unknown) Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in the License: Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/14622 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). Believing in the Net Cover illustration: Visual representation of the Internet. The Opte Project. http://opte.org/ Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht Lay out: Florian Duijsens ISBN-10 9087280750 ISBN-13 9789087280758 NUR-706 / 988 © K. Pärna / Leiden University Press, 2010 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Believing in the Net Implicit Religion and the Internet Hype, 1994-2001 Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof.mr. P.F. van der Heijden, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op donderdag 28 januari 2010 klokke 15.00 uur door Karen Pärna geboren te Tallinn, Estland in 1977 Promotor: Prof. dr. M.B. ter Borg Commissieleden: Prof. dr. E.G.E. van der Wall Prof. dr. W.B. Drees Prof. dr. D. Houtman (EUR) Prof. dr. S. Wyatt (UM/KNAW) TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements … viii List of illustrations … ix INTRODUCTION. Modernity, meaning and the Internet 0.1 Vacuum of meaning? … 1 0.2 Technology and religion … 4 0.3 Theoretical framework … 5 0.4 Sources and method … 7 0.5 This book … 9 CHAPTER 1. Secularisation, and religion beyond its institutions 1.1 Introduction … 11 1.2 Ways of seeing – the persistence of religion … 13 1.3 Implicit religion … 17 1.4 A jungle of terms … 20 1.4.1 Invisible and civil religion … 21 1.4.2 Spirituality … 24 1.4.3 Sacralisation … 27 1.4.4 Re-enchantment and magic … 30 1.5 Conclusion: religion beyond its institutions … 33 CHAPTER 2. The consolations of modernity: ultimate meaning in the secular era 2.1 Introduction … 35 2.2 Ultimate meaning and the sacred … 37 2.3 Themes of ultimate meaning in the secular era … 40 2.3.1 Consumerism … 40 2.3.2 Technophilia … 45 2.3.3 Progress … 50 2.4 Conclusion … 55 CHAPTER 3. Ontological security and hypes 3.1 Introduction … 57 3.2 Ontological security and anomie … 58 3.3 Collective effervescence … 60 3.4 The crowd and the public … 63 3.5 Crazes and hypes … 64 3.6 Conclusion … 66 CHAPTER 4. The roots of the Internet hype: post-cold war anomie and the information age 4.1 Introduction … 69 4.2 The Internet – a history … 70 4.3 The rhetoric of the hype … 74 4.4 Post-cold war anomie … 77 4.5 The information age … 80 4.6 The Third Wave … 82 4.7 The Third Wave in the 1990s … 85 4.8 Conclusion … 86 CHAPTER 5. The dreams of the Internet age 5.1 Introduction … 89 5.2 Transcendence in the age of the Internet … 90 5.3 Control over matter and space … 92 5.4 Leaving the physical world … 96 5.5 Freedom and democracy … 99 5.6 Community and harmony … 103 5.7 Wealth and luxury … 105 5.8 Ultraprosperity … 107 5.9 The end of work … 109 5.10 The religious dreams of the Internet age … 111 5.11 Conclusion … 113 CHAPTER 6. Whiz kids, geniuses, visionaries and cyber-gurus 6.1 Introduction … 115 6.2 Cast of characters … 116 6.3 Heroes and geniuses … 117 6.4 Creators of a new era … 118 6.5 Marginality and genius … 120 6.6 Prophets and visionaries … 124 6.6.1 George Gilder … 124 6.6.2 John Perry Barlow … 127 6.7 Bricoleurs and the cult of genius … 131 6.8 Conclusion … 132 CHAPTER 7. Dotcoms and the peak of the Internet hype 7.1 Introduction … 135 7.2 The dotcoms on the stock market … 136 7.3 The dotcoms in Europe … 137 7.4 The dotcoms – a popular culture phenomenon … 138 7.5 The magic of the dotcoms … 140 7.6 Crash, disillusion and blind faith … 141 7.7 The effervescent religiosity of the dotcoms … 145 7.8 Conclusion … 148 CHAPTER 8. Epilogue: the Y2K hype 8.1 Introduction … 149 8.2 Y2K – the end of the world as we know it … 150 8.3 Y2K survivalism … 153 8.3.1 Collective belief … 154 8.3.2 Y2K: a charismatic, superhuman force … 156 8.3.3 Common cause … 158 8.4 Millennial gurus … 159 8.5 Y2K and the problem of modernity … 161 8.6 Conclusion … 163 CONCLUSIONS 9.1 The enchanting Internet … 165 9.2 New technologies and religion … 167 9.3 Implicit religion … 168 9.4 Trivial religion of the everyday …169 BIBLIOGRAPHY … 173 SAMENVATTING … 195 CURRICULUM VITAE … 203 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion and Contemporary Spirituality in the United Kingdom for partially financing the research project that led to this publication. My thanks go to Prof. Dr. Edward Bailey in particular for his support and enthusiasm throughout the project. Acknowledgements to V.K. Brethouwer, O.J.P. Crapels, E.C. van Diepen, F.M. Duijsens and T.A.P. Zwitzerlood for their respective contributions. ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Cover image ‘The internet era’. Business Week (3649), 04.10.1999 … 89 Figure 2. Cover image ‘The Golden Geeks’. Time, 147(8), 04.02.1996 … 115 Figure 3. Cover image ‘The End of the World!?!’ Time, 152(2), 18.01.1999 … 150 INTRODUCTION MODERNITY, MEANING AND THE INTERNET In the great vacuum of meaning, in the silence of unspoken values, in the vacancy of something large to stand for, something bigger than oneself, technology – for better or worse – will shape our society. Because values and meaning are scarce today, technology will make our decisions for us. We’ll listen to technology because our modern ears listen to little else. In the absence of other firm beliefs, we’ll let technology steer. No other force is as powerful in shaping our destiny. By imagining what technology wants we can imagine the course of our culture. (Kelly 1998: 160) 0.1 A VACUUM OF MEANING? In this passage from the concluding pages of one of the quintessential books of the Internet boom of the 1990s – New Rules for the New Economy. 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1998) – the American journalist and information communications technology guru Kevin Kelly speaks of what he perceives as a “vacuum of meaning”, a lack of true beliefs and reliable values in the world today. He touches upon two matters that have been of great importance to the social sciences: the changes in culture and life-worlds that mark modern technological societies and the fate of meaning and values in the secular West. Kelly’s quote fits well in a scholarly tradition that adheres to the idea that life in our times is marked by a serious crisis of meaning. Without employing the term itself, he is in fact pointing at modernity as the source of the problems that he sketches. The discontinuity between modernity and the long history that preceded it has been a prime concern of those who study life in our times from the perspective of sociology. Although a label for many different phenomena, the term ‘modernity’ is often used in reference to the far-reaching changes in the economy, social structures and intellectual climate of the Western world roughly since the seventeenth century. The transformations linked to it have been interpreted with mixed emotions. To the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the later positivist school modernity’s hallmarks – secular reason, empirical enquiry and systematic knowledge – were above all associated with progress and the continuing betterment of the human 1 condition. The break with the past that modernity represents was welcomed as a positive development. But to many others, this historical fracture represents above all a problem. For instance, in The Consequences of Modernity (1990) the British sociologist Anthony Giddens posits that the world today is confusing and bedazzling to its inhabitants; it is a place that we fail to fully grasp and where we are lost (Giddens: 2-3). He attributes this sense of bewilderment to the ever-diminishing role of traditional social relationships, religion and many other age-old customs in the lives of modern Western individuals. As Giddens puts it, these frames of reference have been “disembedded” from their conventional settings; they have been uncoupled from tradition and have since lost their one-time monopoly (Giddens: 21). In a similar vein, The Homeless Mind (1973) by the German-American sociologist Peter Berger and his co-authors Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner puts forward the melancholy thesis of metaphysical homelessness (Berger et al. 1973: 185). They posit that the minds of contemporary individuals no longer have a fixed dwelling in tradition and long-established (religious) beliefs, certainties that provided guidance in matters relating to human fragility and finitude in earlier times. The meaning of the world at large and the purpose of humans in it have lost their self-evidence. The explanations and solace offered by religion in particular, so goes their argument, can no longer hold their ground.
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