Techno Christianity

Techno Christianity

In the beginning . . .
I started to go online in the 1990s, shortly after the world wide web became available to people with home computers. I was teaching in a college which had a suite of computers connected to the internet, and having tried it out there I bought a modem and went online at home. Home internet connections worked on a ‘dial up’ basis in those days, and there was quite a long pause after clicking to go online while the modem dialled, and then connected to, distant telephone exchanges. The noise of the dialling tones gave the impression of travelling a long distance to reach the mysterious place called ‘cyber space’ where I could read what other people had posted on the world wide web. I didn’t realize at first that it was possible to ‘chat’ to people online in real time, and the first time someone started up a live chat with me I experienced the same sort of shock as I might have had if a character in a book had started speaking to me. A text box suddenly popped up on to my screen and someone in the USA started typing questions about where I lived and why I was looking at that particular web page. At first this live interaction made me feel very nervous, but I soon started to feel more comfortable about ‘chatting’ to people I couldn’t see…