Digital tech and physical space
Sean has posted a quick but thought-provoking comment over here on a recent review by Myles Werntz of a few books on ‘digital church’, focusing on Richard Burridge’s Holy Communion in Contagious Times.
Here are some much less quick thoughts of my own on the same topic. I’m taking as my starting point this quote from Burridge (please note that I am now at several degrees of removal from Burridge’s actual book, so this post is best not read as a direct response to him).
The pandemic has not so much changed what the church is as it has exposed what was already the case: church is a complex space insofar as what humans are is not limited by physical space.
My question then is: what does it mean to say that ‘what humans are is not limited by physical space’?
In the most general sense, it might mean that the realm of action of an individual human extends beyond the reach of his fingers and toes. This can occur through our participation in complex causal chains, much of which consists in the interplay of human agency through social connection. For instance, my husband cooks me a good breakfast, and I throw myself heartily into my work through the rest of the morning. He may be nowhere near me as I work, but he has acted in a way that bears on it. Or to take a less silly example, a government official gives an order which has far reaching consequences for people over whom he has authority, many of whom he may never have encountered physically, or indeed personally. In both of these cases, intention may guide the effects, but it also may not. Our lives are often affected by happenings which are physically remote from us, whether or no the effects are intended.
These two examples then allow us to distinguish two ways that the reach of our actions can exceed our physical presence: By extending through time, and by extending through language. We can act in a particular physical place in a way that brings our humanness to bear on that place while we are later absent from it (e.g. as gardeners sow seed). We can also act on other people who are physically remote from us through our speech. For a very long time this has occurred through written modes of speech (or through messengers)—which is also action extended through time. In the last century or so, the time aspect collapsed through the telegraph and through the instantaneous aural speech of the telephone and the radio, and finally the TV with the visual element brought in. Those are recent changes in the scheme of things, but not the change that’s in view when we think of digital technologies.
To return to digital technologies and the subject of the above quote: what have they revealed about human life and its relationship to physical space which has hitherto been obscured to us?
Perhaps the most important change is that the visual element becomes dominant. The term ‘avatar’, which Werntz’ highlights in his review, certainly draws out this visual aspect — whether the avatar is the now-old-fashioned static image beside text, or the ‘live’ video representation on a Zoom call or a livestream on YouTube. This is significant because our experience of physical space is dominated by the visual sense. Through digital technology, human agents become localised in a digital version of ‘space’ and present to other ‘users’ of this space in a manner that does not occur through the phone call or the long-awaited letter, or even the television which, while also visual, is non-participatory by nature.
But rather than revealing something new, I would argue that this change actually obscures what always has been, and continues to be, essential to what humans are. As I have represented above, it has always been the case that human beings are not limited by physical space as we act in the world. There have certainly been changes in the ways our actions extend beyond us, but the fact of such an extension is neither a change effected, nor a truth revealed, by digital technology. But what has always been apparent to us, and is now much less obvious, is that there is necessarily a physical place we are acting from. To access a livestream, I must be seated before my computer screen or smart TV, or holding a smartphone before my face. There is really no getting around that. Even the purveyors of microchips in the brain must acknowledge that if there was no physical firing of neurons, no brain to implant the chip into, the tool would be worth nothing.
The construction of a digital space marked out through image-projecting avatars threatens to erase the physical space which is the sine qua non of our existence. And it seems to me that if no one else in our time can recognise the devastation this effects on what humans are, the Church at least should. The Church that proclaims the incarnation and bodily death and resurrection of our Lord; that worships him with eating and drinking and that marvellous vibration of breath that is singing; that extends the work of Christ in the world as his very ‘body’, a term which must be meaningless if it does not at least mean the occupation of physical space.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul plays heavily on the distinction between his letter writing and his bodily presence with the church. Paul feels himself required to given an account of why he wrote rather than coming to them in person, and to respond to slanderous complaints: ‘His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account.’ He must defend the scope of influence God has given him through his letters, ‘to reach even to you’ (2 Cor 10:13), which is not so clearly justified to the Corinthians than if he had come to them in person with all the bodily authority they would expect of an apostle. The justifications he returns to again and again are physical in nature: the fact of his first coming in person with the gospel; his genuine preference for being with them, but concern for how they would experience his rebuking presence; the bodily afflictions he and all the apostles undergo for the sake of the Church; the physical representatives he sends to them through Titus and in others, who give much more to the church through their coming than in simply carrying Paul’s letters.
It not that the Corinthians are wrong to wonder at him writing letters instead of coming to them in person. In some sense, the Corinthians are wiser than we are in this, for they at least recognise a significant distinction. The problem is that they have failed to account for what he bears in the body for them, even in his personal absence from them. And this is precisely what I fear we are most likely to forget if we continue to extend ‘church’ into digital ‘space’: there are bodies behind all this disembodied space, and it is in these bodies that we are called to take up the joy and the affliction of our bodily Lord.