Living in the Cloud: Configuring the religious Cyborg in a mobile world | Paul Teusner

Summary: Haraway (1985) suggests a Cyborg is both a fiction and a lived reality. For Haraway, the Cyborg is a metaphor used to help deconstruct narratives that construct and contain gender. In this presentation I wish to consider how the Cyborg may be useful as a metaphor and model for exploring the role of new media technologies in reconstructing religious identities in a contemporary Western context. To do this, I want to locate the concept of the Cyborg at the intersection of three theoretical contexts. The first is the presentation and exploration of values in relation to the Cyborg as depicted in a sample of recent movies and television series, and the religious themes and imagery involved in these depictions and narratives. The second is the evolution of religious values that are embedded in the social construction of Cyberspace. The third is the range of moral and ethical debates around the use of mobile devices in daily life, specifically in relation to “user-generated media content”, “cloud computing” and “augmented reality”. At the nexus of these three contexts I wish to consider how the use of mobile technologies is setting the conditions for new aspirations for humanity and society and our daily travels between the sacred and profane in contemporary Western culture.