Believing in Bits

It unquestionably achieves the goal to awakening the reader to a relevant and engaging academic discussion about how belief and practice take shape in the encounter digital media. * Melissa E. Maples, Religious Studies Review *
Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural recognises the co-constitutive nature of belief and technology and provides compelling and smart cross-disciplinary moments demonstrating such entanglements. * Alexia Derbas, Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture *
Believing in Bits ... unquestionably achieves the goal to awakening the reader to a relevant and engaging academic discussion about how belief and practice take shape in the encounter digital media. * Melissa E. Maples, Uppsala University, Religious Studies Reviews *
Human beings and their technological creations, including and especially their modern digital technologies, reflect, express, and intensify their fundamental strangeness. Scholars have long known that the history of religions is intimately related to the history of technology, from the ancient practices of agriculture, writing, the domestication of the horse, and the forging of iron, to the more recent invention of the printing press and the telegraph and telephone. This book takes that key insight into the present and near future, to the cell phone in your pocket, the computer game on your screen, and the VR system strapped around your skull. This book takes that key insight into the human-techno cyborg that is you. * Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions *
Believing in Bits is a guide to why media technologies are magical: they create beliefs, manipulate thoughts, make us see things. After reading this wonderful collection of essays, you realize why the most natural thing about media is that they are supernatural. This book is full of media archaeological joys and insightful contemporary readings. * Jussi Parikka, Professor of Technological Culture & Aesthetics, University of Southampton *