God or Google: Media Technology Modern Day Replacement for Religion?

Where do the majority of people seem to turn to when they have fears, questions, or in need of an answer? When looking for health cures, diet miracles, counselling or asking any sort of questions of mental, physical, or emotional nature, where is it most people turn?

Do people ask god for their perfect partner? Or do they ask Google?

In an interview with Heidi Campbell of Texas A&M University, Heidi told Fox News reporter “Implicit religion demonstrates technology use can take on a religious role or quality in postmodern culture when it substitutes for belief and behaviors once attached to religion and religious practice".[1] A controversial statement? Very.

Is technology being substituted for belief?

In the article How the iPhone Became Devine: New Media, Relgision, and the Intertexuality of Meaning, Campbell analyzes the way religious terms are often used in with modern technology to make the consumers view the product in a certain light, such as referring to the iPhone as the ‘jesus phone’.

But they also propose that technology has actually become the modern day substitute of religion.

When one thinks about it, God, or a religious deity, is normally omniscient, everywhere and all knowing. Sounds pretty close to the internet doesn't it? And now, with cell phones that now have internet access, people are able to constantly be connected with this ‘higher power’ no matter where they go.

'It' is with you always.

Ask a person what they can not live without many will probably say their cell phone, laptop, computer etc. New media has become the modern day sacred object. Social networks have replaced churches for communial sites of gathering and now are performing the religious function of social cohesion. There are even sacred ‘texts’ and manual on how to use these sacred objects, and with advertisement millions more people around the world are ‘converted’ into this western techno religion each day.

So ask yourself this question...who do you turn to first for help; God? Or Google.

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[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/apple-religion