This document discusses how increased access to information through technology is contributing to changes in religion. It notes that historically, religion relied on localized and limited access to information, but new technologies have led to an "information saturated marketplace." Metrics are provided on growing data volumes and storage capacity. Studies show correlations between increased education, income, internet usage, and religious disaffiliation among younger generations. The concept of a "digital flaneur" is introduced as someone who idly explores cultural memes online without institutional constraints. Opportunities for religious pedagogy using new technologies are discussed.

1. The Digital Flaneur
Religion in an Information Saturated Marketplace

2. Information Saturation: A Moving Target
Volumn Metrics:
- from emergence of literacy to 2003 5 exabytes (5 followed
by 18 zeros)
- in 2015, 5 exabytes every two days
- the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile (a single
project): when it comes online it will collect 15 terabytes
per night of operation

3. “The World’s Most Advanced Digital Camera”

4. Storage Capacity Metrics
- 1986 (dawn of public awareness of the internet) total
storage of 2.6 exabytes
- 2000 (hot technology at the time? CDs) total storage of
54.5 exabytes
- 2007 (hot technology of the time? First Iphone) total
storage 295 exabytes
- 2015 (hot technology of the time? Cloud Computing) No
one is entirely sure

5. Server Farms

6. Traffic or Throughput Metrics
- in 1986 the web mediated 432 exabytes
- in 1983 the web mediates 715 exabytes
- in 2007 the web explodes to 1.2 zettabytes
- in 2015 again exceeds our capacity to measure
(numbers calculated from one-directional data transfers)

8. American Religious Landscape in Full Churn
Since the agricultural revolution and the formation of the
Neolithic village, religion has depended upon localized data
curation, canalization, selective exposure, and segregation.
In other words, it depended in large part on an informational
scarcity market

9. Geographical Isolation as an
Information Control System

10. The Big Three of Secularization
1. Educational attainment (exposure)
2. Income
3. Internet usage
All three of these factors are closely associated since
increases in one are strongly correlated with the presence of
the other two.

11. Youth and Expansion of Secular
Domains
Silent Majority (1928-1945) 11% are “nones”
Baby Boomers (1946-1964) 17% are “nones”
Gen X (1965-1980) 23% are “nones”
Older Millennials (1980-1989) 34% are “nones”
Young millennials (1990-1996) 36% are “nones”

13. Correlations but not Causations to Date
Pew Research Institute is the principal agency tracking both
Internet Usage and Changes in the Religious Landscape.
Lee Rainie, Director of the Internet Project makes the
correlation of internet usage and disaffiliation explicit. He
plans a data collection initiative. (2014)
One study published in MIT’s arXiv (Downey, 2014), uses
data from General Social Survey and finds that internet
usage accounts for 20% of religious disaffiliation.

15. Self-Reports of Religious Attitudes of the Nones
Disaffiliation is only one measure of secularity. Among the
disaffiliated a 2012 survey found that 18% still thought of
themselves as religious and 37% preferred spiritual but not
religious label.
55% of all disaffiliated are neither hostile nor indifferent to
religion. So what are they?

16. The Digital Flaneur of Cultural Memes
19th century gentleman of leisure (chiefly a French trope)
who idled away the days wandering the streets of urban
landscapes.
Among networked individuals who have feasted as a birth
right of a data saturated world, institutional structures of
authority (performance of cultural policing) lose credibility.
Informational isolation cannot be sustained.

17. Are you going to investigate my
lifestyle and its pleasures,
or what?

18. But a digital flaneur of religion?
Does religious information allow for playful dabbling?
Is it a playful handling, but “a serious form of play”?
Is it an epistemologically superior position? A sign of post-
industrial decadence in liberal democracies? Or is it both?
Should we worry shallowness, cultural dilettantism?

19. Only New Age Type Bricolage?

20. Pedagogical Opportunities
Can we imagine a world religions survey text (insert discipline
- specific survey material) where each unit is a VR running on
an Oculus Rift?
Gamify the learning objectives with puzzles, interviews,
embedded texts, whatever is appropriate to engaged
learning. Attend to the utility for assessment demands.
Gaming levels with exit tests before the student can level up.

21. Embed immersive VR sims as part of this text

22. Launch Interface for Music History and Appreciation

23. Audience Awareness
Comprehend student intelligences and harness those
aptitudes for academic work
No need for embattled humanities diatribes. Rather, a
display of the strengths of humanities the class of digital
flaneurs.
Encourages students who straddle the boundaries of
humanities and digital technology (the so-called “Creatives”)

24. Avoid the Big No-No
Humanities advocates in particular are prone to generate
charges of colonization of their disciplines.
- extreme extrapolation exercises designed mostly to create
critical distance and space to defend uniqueness claims
- unique content and competencies are obvious in all
disciplines and to make that point there is no real need
revert to end-times prophecies or stale false dichotmies