Authority
Thirdly, theologians have focused on the various ways in which the internet disrupts traditional loci of authority. One popular version of this is the worry over how websites have replaced papercraft books as the tools for garnering knowledge on any given topic. Another version is the joke about finding it online so it must be true. The joke works because people are generally suspicious at the content they find online. Of course, one cannot help but notice how these two popular expressions of this attitude toward the internet, when taken together, actually betray a confusion and ambivalence with regard to finding information online: are we too beholden to websites and search engines over more traditional means of research, or are we all pretty sure that online material isn’t really that reliable? It seems that we do not know.
Faith communities have particular cause to be concerned about maintaining traditional loci of authority given their already uncomfortable role as choices among many in a marketplace of truth crafted in the modern ideal of pluralism and voluntarism. Real problems arise here. For example, theologian Richard Gaillardetz was already noticing in 2000 the problems of independent “Catholic” websites: “The fact is that however much we may lament over the quality of theological conversation being conducted, it is an exchange being conducted beyond ecclesiastical control. No church office could possibly oversee and credential or approve every Web site that emerges with the word Catholic in its self-description.”21 This gives us insight as to why media and communications are of particular interest to the church. Though we may perceive the sheer number of new loci for “Catholic” information as a new problem, the church has always had to contend with sources of information and knowledge outside its control, which must have relied on some form of mediated communication, however rudimentary it appears to us now. It is at this point where the history of the printing press seems particularly helpful.
Reformation-era historians have long noted the relationship between the Reformers and the pamphlet and other forms of printed materials. Elizabeth Eisenstein takes the example of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses to illustrate the relationship. She argues that schism and debate existed long before Luther’s own list of grievances, but that “scribal campaigns had had a shorter wave resonance and produced more transitory effects. When implemented by print, divisions once traced were etched ever more deeply and could not be erased.”22 But in addition to providing the Reformers with a means of vast and efficient dissemination of antipapal materials, the printing press also afforded the church the ability to standardize its liturgy and practices. According to Eisenstein, “One may say that Catholic liturgy was standardized and fixed for the first time in a more or less permanent mold—at least one that held good for roughly four hundred years.”23 Thus while technology, specifically technologies which facilitate communications, has proven an integral part of the church’s evangelical mission. It has also been the occasion for debate and contention, some of which eventually led to councils whose pronouncements and creeds realign the body back to the truth of the church.24
The issue of authority persists in contemporary discussions of the relationship between magisterium and academic theologians. Anthony Godzieba argues that there is an important technological component to present debates over the hierarchy of truth and the authority of magisterial texts. He poses the following questions:
Does the immediate availability of a wide variety of papal statements via electronic media and the internet change the perceived level of authority that they carry? Even more fundamentally, does this “digital immediacy” influence the reception of these statements, which in turn shapes the statements’ truth-value and their influence on the development of the Roman Catholic tradition, the reality of communion, and the very character of “teaching authority”?25
His answer, in short, is yes: aesthetic differences between online and offline church documents has affected the perceived authority of the documents without regard for traditional levels on the hierarchy of truth within the Catholic Church. Godzieba uses an allocution by Pope John Paul II on assisted nutrition and hydration (ANH) as an example. According to Godzieba, “A one-off papal speech was viewed by some prominent ecclesiastics as a definitive settlement of a contested moral issue.”26 In the debates that ensued over ANH, especially during the case of Terri Schiavo in 2005, theologians attempted to explain how the papal allocution came to have such definitive status. On Godzieba’s view, one that was consistently overlooked was the technological.
For Godzieba, the issue was really “the immediate availability of papal and other official Vatican statements through various electronic media—what I am calling ‘digital immediacy’—and the precise determination of the form of that availability in our aestheticized culture, a culture saturated with images and constituted by a primacy of the visual.”27 His focus, then, is not as much on the content of the allocution but on its form, which is mediated to most of its readers in electronic form. “Digital immediacy” is the norm of the internet age, according to Godzieba, and “this norm bestows on any official statement an absoluteness.”28 The traditional levels of church teaching that allow theologians and others to negotiate particular texts within the Tradition become collapsed in the digital age. As Godzieba says, “Immediacy equals authenticity equals authority.”29
In the same volume in which Godzieba’s chapter appears, Vincent Miller extends the conversation over authority and the internet into the realm of consumer culture. With regard to Godzieba’s claims about the effects of “digital immediacy” on perceptions of magisterial teaching, Miller writes that this immediacy “does not simply free the papacy from the inertia of traditional media structures; it recontextualizes the pope as well.”30 Miller argues that instead of traditional “ecclesial structures” providing the “hermeneutics and pragmatics for interpreting and acting upon magisterial teaching,” consumer culture becomes the interpretive framework for such texts.31 The digital immediacy that Godzieba finds to be a centralizing force for the papacy, reinforcing and exacerbating “managerial” model over and against the communio, leaves it susceptible to commodification of religious traditions. Without the thick interpretive tradition which is skirted by such digital immediacy, the papal and magisterial texts that are Godzieba’s subject become loosed from their requisite hermeneutical mooring. What is lost, according to Miller, are “tradition-specific interpretive habits” and a connection to “shared community practices.”32
Miller goes on to argue that there are particular “cultural dynamisms” at work at the intersection of consumer culture and current communications technology. The first is heterogenization, an effect of globalization that “allows ever more differentiated communities to flourish.”33 With regard to consumerism, the effect of this for Miller is that it “renders social belonging increasingly a matter of choice.”34 Contemporary media ecology allows for and even encourages communities of choice, based on all kinds of common interests, ideologies, and common goals. “All they need to attract,” writes Miller, “is enough participants to maintain a conversation.”35
The second dynamism Miller names is deterritorialization, which he uses to describe the ability of “culture to float free” from the local community, as well as from the nation-state. Speaking elsewhere of deterritorialization, Miller writes, “Globalization arises from and encourages the proliferation of networks, organizations, and operations that escape and erode the national scale.”36 Communications technology is integral to this escape and erosion, which affects the imagination of local communities such as churches as well. This gets at the heart of Miller’s understanding of what the internet does: as the agent of deterritorialization (or perhaps AN agent, although it seems like the internet is the best example of this), “every group, no matter how much it may be in the demographic majority, can imagine itself a minority with no responsibility for their influence over the status quo.”37
The effect of both heterogenization and deterritorialization is an emphasis on identity. For the religiously inclined, the problem with identity is