About
I am a PhD student at the faculty of theology of the university of Leiden, in the Netherlands. My academic interests are crazes inspired by new consumer technologies in general and the highly enthusiastic narratives concerned with ICT and the Internet in specific. Two central questions in particular have my attention. First, how to explain the fact that the commercialisation and popularisation of new technologies - exemplary products of the modern, rational-scientific mindset - are so frequently accompanied by outbursts of collective emotion and utopian fantasies? Secondly, how does the modern, Western society construct meaning: what are its central myths, what does it believe in, what are its (ultimate) values?
In my PhD project ‘Implicit Religion and the Pre-Millennial Internet Hype’ I consider the techno-utopian hopes and dreams projected on the Internet in the second half of the 1990s. I argue that in that context the public discourse about the Internet displayed facets that can be termed (implicitly) religious.
In the thesis I posit that, following its functional definition as a system of sense-making, religion constitutes one of man’s basic needs and that in our predominantly secular society it often finds expression in the form of seemingly non-religious phenomena. I observe a shift in religiosity from institutionalised tradition to the realms of consumer culture and technophilia, the love of technology. These domains have become important sources of meaning for the modern individual. The case study of the project - the Internet hype of the 1990s – offers an informative insight into the significance of consumer technology as an anchor of truths and values.
On the basis of a historical review of the Internet as an economic and cultural phenomenon, I consider the social construction of the religious and miraculous in the contemporary, secular world. I look at the particular appeal of ICT as an object of charisma and explore promises of transcendence associated with the medium Internet. The main questions of the study are: what were the conditions whence this hype arose, how did it succeed in functioning as a source of meaning and how did it fit in the Western society’s existing systems of sense-making.