Wyche, S. P., Hayes, G. R., Harvel, L. D., and Grinter, R. E. 2006. Technology in spiritual formation: an exploratory study of computer mediated religious communications. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 04 - 08, 2006). CSCW '06. ACM, New York, NY, 199-208.On the one hand, the immediacy email affords makes it a highly desirable medium to use to communicate to the laity. Parishoners no longer have to wait until Sunday to learn about members of the congregation that are in need of prayer, and clergy can manage their pastoral care relationships in new timely ways. On the other hand, email also disconnects them from their parishoners in certain cases, particularly counseling. Not only does it distance them physically, reducing what we might term cues, but it simultaneously distances them spiritually. The addition of spirituality in this particular case allows us to explore what it might mean to design technologies that facilitate the imparting of spiritual cues in a computer-mediated conversation.
I guess I don’t know what this means. How is this any different from the classic problem facing remote workers, or geographically scattered participants in an online group? I don’t think I buy the idea of “spiritual cues” being any different from “social cues.” Anyway, I’m not thinking of spirituality as a problem of co-presence. That seems way too easy.
This paper describes an American Christian minister’s use of technologies for religious practices. My minister back home broadcasts all of his sermons via podcast. But does that make the podcast spiritual? I would say definitely not. Spiritual people using technology does make the technology itself spiritual. It does not make the experience of using that technology a spiritual one.
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