Attention as the substance of community: streaming congregations and phone fasts, the industry’s own defectors making the ascetic argument, and the placement rules of the Amish applied to the pocket screen.
Tagged: Anabaptist Catholic Jewish
The same network carries the sermon and the slot machine. Congregations streamed through a plague and discovered both the reach and the thinness of mediated presence; monasteries run digital-detox retreats; the attention economy’s critics inside the technology industry itself (the Center for Humane Technology is staffed by its defectors) now make the ascetic argument in secular form: attention is the substance community is made of, and it is being strip-mined.
The register’s cases supply the spectrum: the Ordnung’s placement rules, the Vatican’s communications ethics, Sabbath apps built by Jews to enforce a Jewish discipline on a gentile device. The flashpoint is recorded as ongoing because the experiments are uncontrolled and universal: a generation is being formed by systems whose designers did not intend formation, and the traditions that specialize in formation are comparing notes.
References
- Dicastery for Communication, Towards a Full Presence (2023)
- Heidi A. Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (2010)
Related Across the Site
- emet Glossary Term — Firmness; faithfulness; truth.
- hesed Glossary Term — Steadfast love; covenant loyalty; mercy.
- mashiach Glossary Term — Anointed one.
- ruach Glossary Term — Breath; wind; spirit.
- Biblical Hebrew Language — The original language of the Hebrew Bible, preserved in the square script with Tiberian vocalization, and still the language of Jewish prayer.
- Twentieth Century Science Era — Relativity, quantum theory, and a priest’s Big Bang; war made science a state enterprise and the scientist’s conscience a public problem; creation-evolution litigation defined the American quarrel while genetics under Lysenko showed the cost of policing conclusions.
- Industrial agriculture Technology — The yield is not in dispute; the terms are: horsepower governed by scale among the Amish, waste forbidden by bal tashchit, the technocratic paradigm indicted by Laudato si’ — and the Green Revolution’s billions fed, recorded in the same ledger.
- Vaccination Technology — From Jenner’s parish campaigns to polio fatwas: mostly embraced, sometimes governed, and fought over in our century along lines that cross every tradition.