The purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to build on the ideas presented in class about technology as a social artifact. Your essays are to be based on three articles immediately below. Yourfirst task is to synthesize the important anthropological insights about technology, design and human interactions that emerge from articles listed below. Your second task is to use course materials to speculate on howBell’s social (or relational) understanding of technology might also be made relevant to the place of technology in human-environment interactions. Yourthirdtask is to explain the relationship between human and technology from Lupton article.You must use a minimum of two academically acceptable sourcesbesides your chosen articles to support your arguments in explain relationship among technology, design and human interactions.
1) Bell, Genevieve
2006No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, religion and techno-spiritual practices. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4206:141-158.
2) Bell, Genevieve, Mark Blythe, and Phoebe Sengers
2005 Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interactions 12(2):149-173.
3) Lupton, D
1995. The embodied computer/user. In M. Featherstone & R. Burrows (EDs.),Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, cyberpunk.Cultures of technological embodiment (97-112). London: Sage Publications
Microsoft Word - 42060141.doc P. Dourish and A. Friday (Eds.): Ubicomp 2006, LNCS 4206, pp. 141 – 158, 2006. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006 No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-spiritual Practices Genevieve Bell Intel, 2111 NE 25th Avenue, Hillsboro, OR, 97124
[email protected] Abstract. Over the last decade, new information and communication technologies have lived a secret life. For individuals and institutions around the world, this constellation of mobile phones, personal computers, the internet, software, games, and other computing objects have supported a complex set of religious and spiritual needs. In this paper, I offer a survey of emerging and emergent techno-spiritual practices, and the anxieties surrounding their uptake. I am interested in particular in the ways in which religious uses of technology represent not only a critique of dominant visions of technology’s futures, but also suggest a very different path(s) for ubiquitous computing's technology envisioning and development. 1 Introduction In mid-January 2004, the Reuters news service flashed out the headline "No More Text Messages from Jesus" signaling the demise of a distinctive Finnish mobile service. According to the wire story, earlier that month, Ville Nurmi, the Ombudsman for Finland's mobile services and regulatory watchdog organization, shut down a mobile service provider that offered text messages from Jesus Christ. The company, which was not named in the proceedings, promised to answer people's prayer with a text message from Jesus [1]. This service, ruled spam through a complex set of maneuvers that included a determination that Jesus did not own a mobile phone, is but one manifestation of the increasing visible intersections of spiritual practice and technological development world wide. The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints runs the world's largest online genealogical service; religiously inspired web logs, portals, bulletin boards, dating sites and chat rooms are flourishing the world over; the Vatican has its own text message service and pod casts, and Pope Benedict XVI his own iPod. Christian gaming software is attracting a strong following, Hindi gods have their own websites, and there is an ongoing debate about the use of Cairo's nascent wireless cloud to broadcast a single call to prayer from the city's many minaret towers. And all around the world, technology manufacturers are increasingly catering to the ways in which computational devices might support religious practices, producing religion-specific technologies and experiences. Given the ways in which religious practices are intimately woven into the fabric of daily life in most parts of the world, it is hardly far fetched to imagine that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) might support a range of existing religious and spiritual activities, as well as helping to create new ones. Here I 142 G. Bell am casting ICTs broadly to include personal computers, public computing sites (i.e.: cyber cafes, web-kiosks and gaming arcades), the Internet, software, games, accessories and gadgets (i.e.: USB flash keys, etc), mobile phones, other wireless devices and the various infrastructures that support them. And indeed recent surveys of internet habits, corporate marketing strategies, and new product developments, all point to the fact that there is a growing (perhaps already grown) segment of the population that uses technology to support religious practices, what I am calling "techno-spiritual practices". Some of these techno-spiritual re-purposings have been documented [2-8], some have been theorized [9-15], and some have been playfully and thoughtfully explored and elaborated [16-18], and there is certainly a growing literature about the impact of new technologies on Islamic practice [19-23], and well- rehearsed arguments on technological avoidances and resistances in certain religious communities [24-25]. For the most part, however, religious or spiritual relationships to, and usages of, ICTs seem to be marginalized to the realm of technological oddities, fodder for cheeky web logs and the occasional appearance in the pages of the New York Times or Wired, written off as just another trend. However, it is my contention that these examples of the ways in which new technologies are delivering religious experiences represent the leading edge of a much larger re-purposing of the internet in particular, and of computational technologies more broadly, that has been underway for some time. Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere [26] that ubicomp's frame of reference should extend to include any ICT that has a ubiquitous presence, this re-purposing could also be a subject of regular discussion or activities, developments and deployments in the ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) community. These techno-spiritual re-purposings are important for the ways in which they highlight alternate paradigms for technology creation, deployment, consumption and resistance, as well as pointing to different communities, practices and habits that could be supported. Furthermore, these re- purposings seems to be of critical importance as the realm of technological infrastructure extends progressively beyond the office, into the home, and many other points of social and cultural significance, including one presumes, places of worship, ritual and meditation. After all, life also happens in the sacred domain. Between 2001 and 2004, I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic research project that sought critically interrogate the ways in which cultural practices were shaping people's relationships to new ICTs in urban Asia [27-28]. Informed by contemporary anthropological theory, the research followed a range of ICTs through seven different sites of production, consumption and resistance, encompassing urban life in India, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Indonesia and Australia. I relied on a range of ethnographic methods and methodologies, including participant observation, semi- structured interviews, ‘deep hanging-out’, and genealogies of ICTs to explore life in one hundred very different Asian households. Throughout the fieldwork process, and on many occasions since then, I have been stuck by the ways in which people's narratives of technology (and life) carried strong references to religious practices, spiritual life and ritual. However, whilst this paper is informed by that research, it does not represent a report on a bounded project that set out to investigate technology and religion at a set of specific sites; rather it is theoretical intervention into the ways in which we constitute ubiquitous computing and what we imagine to be its primary foci. As such, this paper is classic ethnographic intervention – it is descriptive and No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-spiritual Practices 143 interpretative but not simply reportage, it is grounded in anthropological theory and praxis, and ultimately it is less concerned with "implications for design"' and more concerned with implications for theory [29]. Drawing on my fieldwork in Asia, as well as an ethnographically informed survey of religious expression and practice on new technologies (including the internet, mobile phones and computers), I articulate a relationship between religion and technology and explores the impact of such a relationship on ubiquitous computing. In this paper, I argue that we need to design a ubiquitous computing not just for a secular life, but also for spiritual life, and we need to design it now! In no small part, this sense of urgency is informed by an awareness of the ways in which techno- spiritual practices are already unfolding; it is also informed by a clear sense that the ubicomp infrastructures we are building might actively preclude important spiritual practices and religious beliefs. A survey of these new technologies of enlightenment — that is ICTs being repurposed support a range of non-secular activities — reveals unexpected richness and complexity. Here I am interested in both excavating the ways in technology and religious practices have always been interpolated and also theorizing the impact of such an interpolation on ubiquitous computing; in particular the ways in which religious uses of technology represent not only a critique of dominant visions of technology’s futures, but also suggest a very different path(s) for ubiquitous computing's technology envisioning and development. This paper is divided into three sections: (a) a theoretical framework within which to explore techno-spiritual practices; (b) a survey of the range of techno-spiritual practices with a focus on the mobile and internet spaces; and (c) finally a discussion of the impact of techno-spiritual on our imaginings and theorizing of ubiquitous computing. 2 A Theoretical Framework for Techno-spiritual Practices Tirumal lives with his mother in the house in which he grew up in central India.1 Every morning, before the rest of the household awakes, his mother paints muggu designs – white chalk outlines – on the concrete pavement outside of their gates to bring the house good fortune and prosperity as well as to protect her family from ill- health and ill-will. Most Telegu houses have such symbols painted at their doorways, as do many other Indian homes. To an untrained eye, these symbols appear to be little more than decoration. However, at a metaphoric level, this design and the practices it indexes suggest a very different conception of relationships between public and private spaces than found in many western homes. Furthermore, it alludes to a complex framing of danger and security that could imply new home networking, virus alerts and infrastructure securities solutions. What if protection is not about repelling attack, but courting good fortune? Might this inspire different design choices, different rhetorics, and even different technologies? For Tirumal and his family, religion, and spiritual practices are seamless woven into day-to-day living. For others, it is about praying every day, or visiting the temple, or the mosque, or church, or consulting the ngongli [lunar almanac], or counting the 1 In keeping with anthropological ethics, the names of people interviewed in the field have been changed throughout this paper protect confidentiality. 144 G. Bell rosary. It might be individual activities, or those which connect an individual to a broader community of practice or perhaps a larger community undertaking. All of these practices are part of the fabric of daily life. In fact, in