discourse online. Citing Dyer’s piece in Christianity Today, she writes, “The medium itself generates rash, hasty responses, compared with the careful, measured reflection that good theology seeks, or at the least, the kinds of virtuous interactions Christians seek to promote.”18
But Bennett is not keen to give up on theological discourse online. Instead, she points to some ways in which Christians in particular moderate their own discussions. She goes on to cite self-imposed rules and guidelines instituted by online discussion groups. According to Bennett, “Part of what we can see at work in these communal guidelines and checklists is the development of what ethicists call ‘practical wisdom’ or ‘practical reasoning.’”19 She goes on to argue for the place of the local community in forming individuals by means of moral exemplars.
An appeal to the Incarnation is probably the obvious for the aspect of vitriol. Theologians have made appeals to charity, modeled perfectly by Christ, as a means of combating it within both interpersonal attacks and in remediating questionable content. This appeal to charity is often tied to the importance of the local community, as in the case Bennett draws out of the online discussion over Bell’s book wherein one user suggests that one should only say something to another user if he could say it to the person offline as well.
The central question about online vitriol seems to be the one raised by Bennett: Is the “architecture” of the internet, by its very nature, encouraging or even creating such vitriol? Does the internet create more nastiness, either between people or from a moral point of view with regard to the myriad pieces of content which it remediates? In short, it is unclear whether so much theological energy should be put toward the how of mediating vitriol and not toward the what or why of vitriol itself.20
Authority
Thirdly, theologians have focused on the various ways in which the internet disrupts traditional loci of authority. One popular version of this is the worry over how websites have replaced papercraft books as the tools for garnering knowledge on any given topic. Another version is the joke about finding it online so it must be true. The joke works because people are generally suspicious at the content they find online. Of course, one cannot help but notice how these two popular expressions of this attitude toward the internet, when taken together, actually betray a confusion and ambivalence with regard to finding information online: are we too beholden to websites and search engines over more traditional means of research, or are we all pretty sure that online material isn’t really that reliable? It seems that we do not know.
Faith communities have particular cause to be concerned about maintaining traditional loci of authority given their already uncomfortable role as choices among many in a marketplace of truth crafted in the modern ideal of pluralism and voluntarism. Real problems arise here. For example, theologian Richard Gaillardetz was already noticing in 2000 the problems of independent “Catholic” websites: “The fact is that however much we may lament over the quality of theological conversation being conducted, it is an exchange being conducted beyond ecclesiastical control. No church office could possibly oversee and credential or approve every Web site that emerges with the word Catholic in its self-description.”21 This gives us insight as to why media and communications are of particular interest to the church. Though we may perceive the sheer number of new loci for “Catholic” information as a new problem, the church has always had to contend with sources of information and knowledge outside its control, which must have relied on some form of mediated communication, however rudimentary it appears to us now. It is at this point where the history of the printing press seems particularly helpful.
Reformation-era historians have long noted the relationship between the Reformers and the pamphlet and other forms of printed materials. Elizabeth Eisenstein takes the example of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses to illustrate the relationship. She argues that schism and debate existed long before Luther’s own list of grievances, but that “scribal campaigns had had a shorter wave resonance and produced more transitory effects. When implemented by print, divisions once traced were etched ever more deeply and could not be erased.”22 But in addition to providing the Reformers with a means of vast and efficient dissemination of antipapal materials, the printing press also afforded the church the ability to standardize its liturgy and practices. According to Eisenstein, “One may say that Catholic liturgy was standardized and fixed for the first time in a more or less permanent mold—at least one that held good for roughly four hundred years.”23 Thus while technology, specifically technologies which facilitate communications, has proven an integral part of the church’s evangelical mission. It has also been the occasion for debate and contention, some of which eventually led to councils whose pronouncements and creeds realign the body back to the truth of the church.24
The issue of authority persists in contemporary discussions of the relationship between magisterium and academic theologians. Anthony Godzieba argues that there is an important technological component to present debates over the hierarchy of truth and the authority of magisterial texts. He poses the following questions:
Does the immediate availability of a wide variety of papal statements via electronic media and the internet change the perceived level of authority that they carry? Even more fundamentally, does this “digital immediacy” influence the reception of these statements, which in turn shapes the statements’ truth-value and their influence on the development of the Roman Catholic tradition, the reality of communion, and the very character of “teaching authority”?25
His answer, in short, is yes: aesthetic differences between online and offline church documents has affected the perceived authority of the documents without regard for traditional levels on the hierarchy of truth within the Catholic Church. Godzieba uses an allocution by Pope John Paul II on assisted nutrition and hydration (ANH) as an example. According to Godzieba, “A one-off papal speech was viewed by some prominent ecclesiastics as a definitive settlement of a contested moral issue.”26 In the debates that ensued over ANH, especially during the case of Terri Schiavo in 2005, theologians attempted to explain how the papal allocution came to have such definitive status. On Godzieba’s view, one that was consistently overlooked was the technological.
For Godzieba, the issue was really “the immediate availability of papal and other official Vatican statements through various electronic media—what I am calling ‘digital immediacy’—and the precise determination of the form of that availability in our aestheticized culture, a culture saturated with images and constituted by a primacy of the visual.”27 His focus, then, is not as much on the content of the allocution but on its form, which is mediated to most of its readers in electronic form. “Digital immediacy” is the norm of the internet age, according to Godzieba, and “this norm bestows on any official statement an absoluteness.”28 The traditional levels of church teaching that allow theologians and others to negotiate particular texts within the Tradition become collapsed in the digital age. As Godzieba says, “Immediacy equals authenticity equals authority.”29
In the same volume in which Godzieba’s chapter appears, Vincent Miller extends the conversation over authority and the internet into the realm of consumer culture. With regard to Godzieba’s claims about the effects of “digital immediacy” on perceptions of magisterial teaching, Miller writes that this immediacy “does not simply free the papacy from the inertia of traditional media structures; it recontextualizes the pope as well.”30 Miller argues that instead of traditional “ecclesial structures” providing the “hermeneutics and pragmatics for interpreting and acting upon magisterial teaching,” consumer culture becomes the interpretive framework for such texts.31 The digital immediacy that Godzieba finds to be a centralizing force for the papacy, reinforcing and exacerbating “managerial” model over and against the communio, leaves it susceptible to commodification of religious traditions. Without the thick interpretive tradition which is skirted by such digital immediacy, the papal and magisterial texts that are Godzieba’s
