As disaster unfolds in Kosovo, bombs rain on Belgrade and refugees flood into Albania and elsewhere, the internet has become one of the new dimensions of international conflict.  The technology of “smart” missiles is not unrelated to email messages from relatives and missionaries nearby, or to the hacking skills of Serbians attacking Nato information sites on the Worldwide Web.

 Lochhead is a theologian, an early user of internet communication, and a thinker.  He outlines how Christians appropriated computers as an aid to ministry.  Just as importantly he asks questions about how perceptions of reality are also being altered, the dangers of the culture it creates, as well as the benefits, and what it means for Christians to appropriate technology at the same time as they are critical of its impact. 

 His is the informed critique of an involved user. It is refreshing to read someone who understands the risks, believes in the benefits and is not scared by the one or seduced by the other.  Christians should have some experience in dealing with the demonic and messianic labels that technology can acquire on its way to being tamed.  Information Technology is no exception.  Lochhead overviews the computers of our fears and imagination as well as of the exploding capacities of technology itself.  He explores the ambiguity and promise of the “digital word.” There is sin in cyberspace - real enough to those whose emails include daily doses of unsolicited pornography.  His explanation of the language and of the opportunities which those who have never used email or searched the Worldwide Web find hard to imagine, is helpful, as is his description of computers as “possibility machines” operating with information of all kinds reduced to binary code.  Underlying it all is the paradox that “a bit is a ‘nothing’ that can represent anything.”  This may be a key to the basic ambiguity.  The moral neutrality of the instrument is one thing, the way it empowers the morality, or lack of it, of the user, and the cultures it creates in the process are something else.  This is not “guns don’t kill people, people do” because guns are built for that purpose. The purpose of the computer is much more in the hands of the user, notwithstanding its inviting capacity for wasting time in the name of saving it.

 Lochhead does not appear familiar with the growth of computers for mission, but traces well the parallel developments in church administration and among hobbyist clergy. Priests and laymen contrived to liven up Sunday School classes, track members, choose hymns and correlate the way theologians made use of the Bible.  Modems created information sharing which went beyond sermons as denominational networks evolved, died and were reinvented.  They created new communities by spectacularly ignoring old boundaries.

 The chapter on the “digital Word” shows the benefits of Lochhead’s theological and philosophical background, as he sorts through the representational nature of language and the way this is and is not changed by reducing symbols to binary code.  The “Gospel and Culture” paradigm remains important for exploring the social effects of the world of communication Information Technology has facilitated.  There are issues in the reversion to icons as pictures of truth, and in the way in which the logic of hypertext links changes the structure of information presentation (as on a web site) as well as the way a user can follow the trail of their thought without regard to the structure of the author’s presentation.  Patterns of reasoning are not the same when we are dealing with mind-maps writ large as when we were dealing with the linear structure of stories, sentences and books.

 Lochhead has his own website, which is easy to find, and articles with charming titles such as “Have you hugged your computer today?” It is a bit like saying that when you die you want to be buried with your computer, or vice-versa.  Those interested in computers and mission might like to see my article in the January 1999 issue of Missiology, “The Information Superhighway as a Missiological Tool of the Trade.”

 Shifting Realities. Information Technology and the Church, By David Lochhead, xv + 110 pages, is published by WCC Publications (Risk Book Series), Geneva, 1997.

(David Lochhead died unexpectedly mid 1999, after this review was written. Tributes to him as a person, a theologian and a pioneer in serious theological reflection on the implications of the internet, can be found on the Vancouver School of Theology website, and on http://www.religion-research.org/irtc/lochhead.htm ).