5 Augmented graves and virtual Bibles Digital media and material religion Tim Hutchings Introduction In the opening chapter of this volume, David Morgan speaks of material culture in terms of ‘objects, spaces, bodies and the practices of using them . . . images, emotions, sensations, spaces, food, dress or the material practices of putting the body to work.’ ‘To study religious material culture’, he explains, ‘is to study how people build and maintain the cultural domains that are the shape of their social lives’, treating objects as primary aspects of what religion is and how it is lived. This chapter seeks to explore and question this understanding of the material object by applying it to the realm of mediation. First, what would it mean to think of websites, mobile phone apps or QR codes as objects, to be studied as part of material cultures? Second, how can we apply Morgan’s approach to “production” – in terms of medium, design and manufacture – to generate insights into the place of digital media in contemporary religion? I will begin by tracing the Internet’s shift over time from the alternative reality of “cyberspace” to its contemporary status as the mundane, often invisible infrastructure of everyday life. Understanding this change in our relationship with computer-mediated communication provides an important foundation for material analysis. I will then discuss digital technology and online content as kinds of “materiality”, drawing on recent discussions in material religion and digital media studies. To apply a material approach to the study of digital production, I will introduce examples taken from two rather different fields: digital Bibles and online memorials. As we shall see, the materiality of digital media is not limited to the level of technologies and devices. Digital software and content also function just like material objects: they are produced, classified and circulated, and they guide, structure, constrain and make concrete our actions and relations. By paying attention to the different dimensions of the materiality of media, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which religion today is structured and provoked by material objects and their creators. From cyberspace to infrastructure In early visions of computer-mediated communication, the digital was positioned as the antithesis of embodiment and materiality. Computer networks 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 85 07-10-2016 16:44:24 86 Tim Hutchings offered us access to “cyberspace”, a separate realm in which identity could be fluid, knowledge was open for access and all boundaries could be overcome by the masters of new technology. William Gibson famously defined “cyberspace” in his science fiction novel Neuromancer as ‘a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions’ (1984: 67); for Case, his protagonist, cyberspace is ‘a bodiless exultation’, an experience of speed and power compared to which the human body is a prison of ‘meat’ (1984: 12). Neuromancer became one of the foundational influences for the cyberpunk genre of science fiction. This style of writing attracted a fascinated audience in the early years of the Internet, for whom cyberpunk’s discussions of fluid identities, the freedom of anonymity, corporate control and the subversive power of the hacker seemed to mirror what was already happening through computer networks. Even in these fictional accounts of cyberspace, however, materiality was crucial. The protagonists of early cyberpunk may have longed to escape from the flesh into disembodied experience, but their narratives were driven by material frustrations: bodily pain, broken technologies, the struggle to access the right connection at the right moment. Over time, academic study and popular imagination have moved away from these early interests. As Internet use began to become more widespread in the late 1990s, digital cultures became increasingly tied to offline identities and social networks. Researchers are still studying the cultures of online communities, but ethnographer Christine Hine describes the contemporary Internet as ‘embedded, embodied, and everyday’ (Hine 2015). It is embedded, because the Internet is ‘entwined in use with multiple forms of context and frames of meaning-making’ (2015: 33); it ‘means quite different things to different people’ (2015: 38). The Internet is experienced as one option for action or communication, one alternative among others. It is embodied, because virtual identities are rarely separate from physical bodies: ‘rather than being a transcendent cyberspatial site of experience, the Internet has often become a part of us’ (2015: 41). Online social network sites like Facebook are used as ‘a place to express an embodied self rather than a place to leave the body behind’ (2015: 44). The Internet is everyday, acting as ‘a mundane, invisible infrastructure’ for society (2015: 46). As an infrastructure, the Internet structures choices and priorities, does work and makes decisions for us, but we become aware of it only when it is ‘topicalised’ in moments of crisis, ranging from national panic about jihadi radicalisation to the personal disaster of losing access to Wi-Fi. When infrastructure betrays us or fails us, we have a chance to relearn its significance. Nonetheless, the early dream of the immaterial Internet remains powerful in much public discourse. To pick just one example, a recent issue of the Swedish popular philosophy magazine Modern Filosofi chose the Internet as its cover story (Modern Filosofi 2015), under the headline ‘Do I Exist on the Internet? A Digital Humanity without a Body’ (‘Finns jag på nätet? En digital människa utan kropp’). Philosophers, we are told, do not agree. Modern Filosofi interviews two academic scholars (media theorist Amanda Lagerkvist and philosopher Fredrik Svenaeus) and frames their conversation as a classic cyberspatial debate, 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 86 07-10-2016 16:44:24 Digital media and material religion 87 opposing digital immateriality against physical embodiment and the ‘internet self ’ against ‘my self in real life’ (2015: 33). Our lived experience of the Internet may often be ‘embedded, embodied, and everyday’ (Hine 2015), but old hopes and fears remain. Digital media as material religion In one of the first issues of the journal Material Religion, Chris Arthur tentatively suggested that the Internet might be of interest to scholars of religious materiality. Digital content is a weak substitute for the real thing, he claims: the gravity of the tangible, the authentic, attends objects in a way that is impossible for the Web’s spectral presences. However ingeniously they may construct their simulacra, there is always the whisper of the replica about them rather than the roar of the real. (Arthur 2005: 289) Nonetheless, Arthur proposes, the Internet is full of images, sites and practices that could be considered a ‘novel (virtual) materiality’ (2005: 291), from museum exhibitions to meditation rooms and virtual pilgrimages. Scholars need to take these ‘virtual artefacts’ seriously. Arthur was writing when the study of digital religion was in its infancy. Scholars initially found it difficult to take Internet religion seriously, and struggled to give much credence to practitioners’ reports about the spiritual, personal and emotional significance of websites and online conversations. Researchers today are less likely to question the efficacy of online religious practices, and more likely to explore their integration into the everyday lives of users – reflecting the trend in Internet use and scholarship encountered earlier. A decade later, digital media has become an accepted part of the study of religious materiality. A new volume of keywords in the study of material religion (edited by S. Brent Plate) includes a chapter on “Digital”, in which Gregory Price Grieve argues that ‘digital media have transformed the conditions of religious practice and peoples’ relationships to each other and to the divine’ (2015: 56). For example anyone can now open an “iRosary” app on their iPhone and digitally recreate the experience of thumbing through a string of beads. The app even causes the device to vibrate, to give a physical sensation to the hand as the user moves from one bead to the next. The app tries to faithfully represent the traditional Catholic practice of praying the rosary while using the multimedia storage power of digital media to give the user access to a library of prayers and imagery. Unlike Arthur, Grieve does not find this surprising; the use of digital media by religious communities and practitioners is now taken for granted. Birgit Meyer has written extensively and influentially about the relationship between mediation and material religion, including an article titled ‘Medium’ for a keywords issue of Material Religion in 2011. Meyer argues that ‘a focus 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 87 07-10-2016 16:44:25 88 Tim Hutchings on media is central to “rematerializing” our understanding of religion’ (Meyer 2011: 60). Mediation ‘produces belief ’ (2011: 61) by making the transcendent accessible, present and sense-able – and that process ‘leads right to the question of religion and materiality’ (2011: 60). Different traditions accept or reject different media forms, but their preferences are not static: ‘the negotiation and adoption of new (or newly available) media . . . [are] central to the transformation, and hence continuation, of religion’ (2011: 60). We can see one example of this development process in the contrast between Arthur’s suspicion of inauthentic websites and Grieve’s comfortable acceptance of mobile apps. In the three articles we have just considered, Arthur, Grieve and Meyer insist that material culture scholars should pay attention to digital media. Surprisingly, however, they do not define what aspects of digital media they have in mind or what makes those aspects “material.” All material religion might be a kind of mediation, as Meyer argues, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that all media are material objects. This lack of clarity in defining the “material” is not just an oversight but a major feature of the field: discussions of material religion tend to be much clearer about what they oppose than about what they affirm, as Joanne McKenzie and I pointed out in our introduction to this volume. Substantive definitions of the “materiality” of religion are not easy to find, and most surveys of the field prefer to identify a set of common themes and interests. S. Brent Plate’s recent definition of the field is helpful (Plate 2015: 3) but creates a potential obstacle for our attention to the digital by describing the study of material religion as ‘an investigation of the interactions between human bodies and physical objects’. “Physical” seems to rule out electronic media, but Plate then goes on to include “the Internet” as an example of a human-made object on the next page (2015: 4). An “object”, it seems, is simply that which is not an idea, and even ideas ‘begin in material reality’ (2015: 4). This leaves us with a problem. It is commonplace to include studies of digital media within the field of “material religion”, and to use the concept of “mediation” to think about how material objects work religiously, but what does it actually mean to talk about the digital as part of material culture? First, we must decide what aspects of the digital should be included in discussion of materiality, and what has to be left out. Arthur and Grieve both focus their attention on digital reproductions of the physical objects and images of conventional religion; should that physical-digital contrast be the limit of our concern? Digital religion today is much more diverse than this kind of remediation; volumes on material religion have addressed topics like online gaming, for example, which appear to go beyond such a limited approach (Aupers 2012). Second, we should remember that re-materialising the digital is a political move, embedding media practice in everyday life in opposition to a particular vision of freedom and the future. Some early forms of online religious practice were explicitly hostile to the body, sharing the cyberpunk vision of computer-mediated escape from the limitations of materiality. These examples 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 88 07-10-2016 16:44:25 Digital media and material religion 89 were uncommon, but Christian critics of online religion continue to accuse practitioners of longing for immateriality. Popular imagination of the digital has since moved away from “cyberspace” into a more embedded, infrastructural understanding of digital technologies, but we still need to remember that the materiality of the digital is not self-evident or politically neutral. Scholars of digital religion need to think more clearly about what exactly we are calling “material”, and who benefits from that materialisation. Materialising the digital Fortunately for this discussion, the idea of “materiality” has been debated in great detail by digital media researchers, particularly in the digital humanities, human-computer interaction and the newer field of digital anthropology. Paul Leonardi (2010) identifies the key problem clearly: writers interested in “materiality” have tended to oppose the physical that can be touched against the conceptual that cannot, but digital software is neither physical nor conceptual. Material objects have affordances and properties that constrain people’s interaction with them, while the conceptual realm – which for Leonardi includes norms, discourses, routines, institutions and rituals – offers greater freedom for improvisation. Software does not fit into either category; it structures what we can do, and yet it does not seem to be made of physical stuff. In discussions of religion and material culture, we can identify two different ways of thinking about materiality: “essentialist” (in which material means physical) and “binary” (in which the material is defined through its opposition to some alternative, usually “belief ”). For theorists of digital media, both options are problematic. Instead, digital theorists tend to take what we could term a “functionalist” approach, in which the “material” includes anything that acts like a physical object. Material things constrain our freedom of action and engage us in relationships; to the extent that digital media function in the same way, they are material. Digital humanists have been particularly interested in what happens to a text when it is digitised, because the instantiation of a text in a medium strongly influences how we interact with it.To address this, some have proposed separating the structuring role of material objects from their physicality, a good example of the “functionalist” approach. According to Marlene Manoff, a librarian, ‘electronic objects are material objects’ (2006: 312), with their own distinctive range of material properties: When studying the history of the book, attention to materiality means analyzing such things as typography, binding, illustrations, and paper to understand their role in the creation of meaning. In a world of digital artifacts, textual scholars may consider a whole new range of physical objects and processes, including platforms, interfaces, standards, and coding . . . and a new concern with the graphical elements of textuality. (2006: 312) 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 89 07-10-2016 16:44:25 90 Tim Hutchings The imagined opponent here is not the scholar of beliefs but the careless archivist, who believes we can copy a text from one medium to another – by digitising a manuscript, or printing out an e-book – without a loss of meaning. For Manoff, ‘the properties of electronic objects alter our ways of creating and consuming information’ (2006: 311). Knowledge is always ‘shaped by the technologies used to produce and distribute it’. Designers of digital technologies have also been fascinated by materiality. Erica Robles and Mikael Wiberg have written a number of articles about the materiality of digital media, drawing on their collaborative work in interaction design. Robles and Wiberg point out that digital design has tended either to treat materiality as a metaphor – for example in user interfaces that whimsically reference files, folders, paperwork and desktops – or to hide computation invisibly within everyday physical objects – for example in the field of ubiquitous computing. They argue that ‘information technology seems to exist in-between the material and the immaterial, with properties so flexible it almost can take on any form imaginable’ (Robles and Wiberg 2010: 138), and they call for designers to explore this through a new focus on the aesthetic integration of digital and physical. Robles and Wiberg propose the concept of ‘texture’, which draws attention to the way underlying structure relates to surface appearances and ‘advocates investigating the range of properties exhibited by digital and physical materials and crafting compositions from their relation’ (2010: 142). More recently, Heather Horst and Daniel Miller have argued that a commitment to materiality must be one of the key principles of digital anthropology, because digital worlds ‘are neither more nor less material than the worlds that preceded them’ (Horst and Miller 2012: 4). We must not reduce the world to social relations in our analysis – a particular temptation for sociologists – because ‘social order itself is premised on a material order . . . it is impossible to become human other than through socializing within a material world of cultural artefacts’ (Horst and Miller 2012: 24). This emphasis on human interactions with objects is commonplace in introductions to material religion, but Horst and Miller point out that we must also attend to ‘the order, agency and relationships between things themselves and not just their relationship to persons’ (2012: 24). In the digital environment, software can talk to software, data can be collected and analysed and Internet-connected objects can communicate with other objects, all without the involvement of human bodies. So what, specifically, is material about digital worlds? Horst and Miller propose three answers: the materialities of ‘digital infrastructure and technology’, of ‘content’ and of ‘context’ (2012: 25). The materiality of ‘infrastructure’ reminds us that the digital is ‘a material and mechanical process’.The digital is ultimately made up of binary zeros and ones, stored electronically; saving, accessing and deleting data can be difficult technical processes. Digital devices have a particular shape and feel, as Grieve observed in his study of the iRosary. Computers must be made and disposed of, and networks must be connected with wires and cables, all with considerable environmental consequences. 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 90 07-10-2016 16:44:25 Digital media and material religion 91 The materiality of ‘content’ includes information, webpages and virtual environments, the stuff produced, copied, accessed and circulated by digital technologies. Visual culture studies can show us that websites ‘are systematically designed to seduce and entrap’ their target audience, while repelling those whose attention is unwanted; online images, in other words, function just like any other kind of artwork. The final kind of digital materiality, ‘context’, reminds us that digital technologies can be used to help people and objects communicate and connect, producing ‘a new kind of place’ online with new boundaries, proximities and demands for attention (Horst and Miller 2012: 27). As Horst and Miller demonstrate, study of digital media must pay close attention to its physicality, as well as to how our action is shaped and constrained by digital content and our relationality is structured by digital contexts. Robles and Wiberg offer an intriguing design approach to physicality through their concept of ‘texture’, while Manoff reminds us of the distinctiveness of the content and context of digital texts. In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore these different kinds of materiality using examples drawn from recent research in the areas of Bible-reading and bereavement. In both cases, material objects have historically played a crucial role in mediating relationships between the living, the dead and the divine, engaging the body and the senses in ways that can at times be overwhelmingly intense. These objects have also been highly contested, acting as focal points for tension between and within religious traditions. As we shall see, Bibles and memorials are supposed to educate and form the religious user, through their materiality as well as their content. First case study: digital media and the Bible I have written extensively about digital Bibles elsewhere (e.g. Hutchings 2015), focusing particularly on the apps produced by an American company called YouVersion. YouVersion’s Bible App has been installed more than 200 million times and offers free access to thousands of translations and audio versions in hundreds of different languages. Users can select from a wide range of reading plans, track their progress, program their app to issue regular reminders and share their favourite passages through social media. YouVersion’s Bible App is a material object, in all of the ways outlined earlier. It is accessed through a mobile phone or tablet with specific kinds of affordances and capabilities, making it possible for users to have the Bible with them at all times without needing to carry a physical book. The app is designed as a “persuasive technology”, inviting the user to read and share the Bible more frequently, in line with traditional evangelical Christian understandings of how the Bible should be used. The Bible App’s traditional approach to the work of reading is mirrored in some of its visual design, which follows the metaphorical approach critiqued by Robles and Wiberg (2010): the app’s icon, for example, is a brown leather-bound book with a ribbon as a placeholder. The app also records data, which YouVersion can use to analyse user activity. The Bible App 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 91 07-10-2016 16:44:26 92 Tim Hutchings creates spaces and contexts for interaction between users, through shared use of devices, circulation of messages to followers through social media and mutual awareness among connected friends through the app’s own newsfeed. All three aspects of Horst and Miller’s framework for digital materiality are at work here: technology, content and context. In this chapter, I will focus on a very different kind of digital Bible. ‘Uncover’ is a physical, printed book, a pocket-sized copy of Luke’s Gospel, produced by the UK’s Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) in 2013. According to the UCCF website, the Uncover books ‘have been hailed [by Christian leaders] as one of the best evangelistic resources ever to have been produced by UCCF’, and more than 150,000 copies were distributed in 2013 (UCCF n.d.). While the Bible App tries to remediate the familiar image of a leather-bound Bible, Uncover resembles an ordinary student notebook accompanied by a series of online videos. Uncover combines physical and digital resources, and we can use this example to explore the materiality and immateriality of digital religion. I discussed Uncover in an interview with UCCF’s head of communications, Pod Bhogal, in 2013. UCCF does use digital media, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but Bhogal argued that the most effective context for evangelism is local, relational and informal. In a personal conversation, Christian students can address the questions that most interest the individual they are seeking to persuade – an advantage over the more structured conversations required by courses like Alpha. Finding the right tone for Uncover was crucial to enabling this kind of engagement. ‘We didn’t want to tell people what to believe,’ Bhogal explained, but to encourage conversation and to make the book ‘as accessible and interactive as possible’. Every other page is blank for personal notes, and the inside covers of the book are decorated with images of pencils, rulers and other study equipment, framing the object as a tool for the student reader to mark and write on. The digital element of the project appears in the form of QR codes, printed on many of the book’s pages. If readers use their smartphone to scan one of these codes, they find an online video in one of two different series. The first, written and presented in six instalments by recent university graduates, leads the reader on a twenty-minute ‘journey through the gospel’. Each video examines a section of the text and links to the next. According to Bhogal, this stream introduces the whole gospel ‘in a way that is accessible and plausible, because the amount they have to read is reduced and they are using a medium they are familiar with’. If readers then return to the start of Uncover to read the whole gospel in linear order, they will encounter further QR codes linking to videos in which non-student “experts” answer questions about key aspects of Christian teaching. UCCF thought carefully about how to combine digital and print. ‘Different kinds of media have different kinds of appeals,’ Bhogal explained: for example blank pages added opportunities that digital media would have struggled to provide. Despite the ease with which words can be typed and edited on a 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 92 07-10-2016 16:44:26 Digital media and material religion 93 screen, the ‘immediacy’ of scribbling on paper still has ‘relevancy and power’. On the other hand, including digital resources helps UCCF connect with its target audience: ‘there’s something about a hardback book that will never go out of fashion,’ but digital media offers greater accessibility and convenience, and videos appeal to some readers more than text. The physicality of Uncover’s printed book is also intended to speak to cultural understandings of giving and reciprocity. ‘The idea behind the hardback gospel is that we want it to be a gift,’ Bhogal explained, to be presented by the Christian student to a non-Christian friend. As a gift, the physical book becomes a bond between giver and recipient and presents a material invitation to share an act of reading. Sending a link to a website, UCCF felt, would not have carried the same personal significance. To work as a gift, Uncover had to pay careful attention to design. This was a product that had to be ‘not cringey’, so Uncover was modelled after the fashionable, expensive Moleskine line of notebooks, with an attractive hardcover design, additional paper sleeve and elastic strap – all visible, material suggestions of quality and value. There are clear parallels to be drawn here with the recent popularity of “niche Bibles”, marketed with attractive, high-quality covers and demographic-specific commentary as gifts for children, or with the older tradition of high-quality Bibles designed as gifts and prizes. In each case, the physical object is designed to enact a relationship between giver and receiver, to convey a message about the quality of its textual contents, and to position the receiver under an obligation to read it. A material approach to digital religion must consider the differences between digital and physical objects, as well as what they have in common. I have interviewed and surveyed users of digital Bible apps like YouVersion, and many of them expressed reservations about material consequences of shifting from print to screen (Hutchings 2015). Some argued that a digital Bible made it harder to remember where a particular passage lay in the overall structure of the canon, and reported that they were more likely to skim-read and jump between texts. For others, the loss was more emotional. One respondent reported that ‘I feel more distanced from it’ on screen, ‘frustrated at not having the personal contact of the paper and print’. Their paper Bibles had built up memories and associations, as an object that they had received as a gift and carried with them through life. The physical form of Uncover has been designed by UCCF to encourage these kinds of material relationships with and through the book, dimensions that the organisation feared a digital-only Bible might struggle to generate. Second case study: digital memorials This brief discussion of memory leads us to our second area of study. Paper Bibles can act as memory objects, preserving constructions of relationships. As José van Dijck has argued,‘concrete objects stand for relational acts of memory’, and we use them to inscribe and communicate our identity and ‘to situate ourselves in contemporary and past cultures’ as well as to trigger recall of particular 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 93 07-10-2016 16:44:26 94 Tim Hutchings memories (2007: 24). As our identities develop and evolve, we reformulate and edit our memory objects, which may involve discarding them, moving them to new places or altering their contents. A Bible may move from a prominent shelf to a less prominent storage box or back to a bedside table; it may be proudly displayed at a funeral; it may acquire a new cover, additional annotations or new additions to a family tree page. It may remain unchanged, embodying old memories and connections and awaiting their rediscovery by a future generation. Memory objects play a particularly rich role in death, bereavement and commemoration. Memorialisation is of particular interest to scholars of religion – as demonstrated in a number of chapters in this book – because it can be used to explore the shifting boundaries between religion and non-religion. All social groups must find ways to re-establish the security of their social bonds after the loss of members, and some but not all of the resources required for this process are drawn from religious traditions. In times of mourning, memory is materialised across the spectrum of public and private spaces: the living construct public memorials to the dead, erect gravestones in separate cemeteries, preserve family photographs in their homes and store personal items that may be seen by only one individual. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik have borrowed the language of digital media to refer to graves as “interfaces”, surfaces through which the living can interact with and perform their connection to the dead (2014: 251). Digital technologies are now also very important in the memorial practices of many families and social groups, perpetuating some customs and transforming others. In some cases, digital media have been used to augment physical memorials, just as Uncover added QR codes to a paper Bible. Some stonemasons have experimented with adding QR codes to graves, cutting a pattern onto the tombstone that can be scanned by a visitor’s smartphone. The grave then becomes a physical link to a digital memorial, in which the dead can be commemorated through photographs, videos, messages and other media. As Stine Gotved has observed, this can generate problematic interruptions between public and private space (2015: 275). A very large QR code can be scanned from a discreet distance, but visually marks the grave; a very small code is discreetly hidden, but forces the visitor to invade the gravespace in order to access it. The grave itself may be considered a space of private emotion, but it lies within the more public cemetery, perhaps under the eye of other visitors. Digital resources may be more private in tone, but they can be accessed from anywhere in the world. A mobile phone is a personal communication device, but some would still consider the use of a phone unacceptable within the sacred, silent space of a cemetery. And, of course, there is no guarantee that QR codes will still be in use in the future. A QR code connects a grave to a digital resource, allowing a person at the gravesite access to multi-modal memories of the deceased. Digital media are thus embedded into the context of cemetery visiting. A different kind of connection between digital and physical is enacted by websites like Billion Graves (billiongraves.com), which aims to serve local historians and family genealogists. 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 94 07-10-2016 16:44:26 Digital media and material religion 95 Using the Billion Graves app, visitors to graveyards can take photographs of each headstone, upload them to the website tagged with a GPS location, and then transcribe as much information as they can still read. This information is then stored in a searchable database, making it easier to find specific graves around the world. In this case, digital technology archives data about physical objects in order to help coordinate embodied visits to those objects. A digital technology or resource can also become a memory object in its own right. The dead now leave behind a legacy of devices, accounts and online content, including their mobile phones, computers, folders of digital photographs, blogs, computer game characters and email accounts.The bereaved must choose to access, archive, discard or delete the continuing digital presence of those who have died, and this process is not always straightforward – accessing online accounts may require finding passwords, for example. Designers have also experimented with memorials that combine physical and digital resources, experimenting with ‘textured’ materialities (to borrow Robles and Wiberg’s terminology). These projects often remediate archives of photographs or other legacies, incorporating media traces of the deceased into multi-modal memorials. Daisuke Uriu and Naohito Okude’s ‘ThanatoFenestra’ is of particular interest to scholars of religion, because it is based on a traditional Japanese Buddhist family altar. The user lights a real candle, positioned in front of a small round screen. The device registers each flickering movement of the flame – which could be caused by a puff of air blown by the user – and this triggers the display to cycle through a series of digital photographs of the deceased. A bowl of aromatic oil above the candle sends smoke rising past the image and ‘cleanses their spirits . . . as if burning incense sticks’ (Uriu and Okude 2010: 423). Wendy Moncur, Elise van den Hoven, Miriam Julius and David Kirk have collaborated on a design project called ‘Story Shell’, working with a bereaved parent, Mayra, to create a ‘bespoke, tangible, digital memorial’ for her home (2015: 470). The object they produced is a smooth white sphere, comfortable to hold, manufactured with a 3D printer. Through a hole in the top, the user can see a spiral decoration, laser cut from paper. Beneath this lie a speaker, LED lights and a sensor. Technology is made invisible, a design tendency identified by Robles and Wiberg. Moncur and her colleagues do not explain this decision, but it is possible that they felt that visible electronics would be inappropriate for a memorial, falling outside the boundaries of the ‘sensational form’ (Meyer 2011) of contemporary grief. When the user picks up the object, the sensor triggers replay of recorded stories in which Mayra talks about her son, Andrew, and the speaker is powerful enough to gently vibrate the sphere while the stories play. Unexpectedly, Mayra chose to address Andrew directly in her storytelling, and for the researchers ‘this implied that our central design goal of presence had been realised, as Andrew was vividly present for Mayra during this experience’ (Moncur et al. 2015: 476). The use of LEDs echoes Uriu and Okudo’s candle (2010), but Moncur and her colleagues make no mention of religious or spiritual context for their use 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 95 07-10-2016 16:44:27 96 Tim Hutchings of light (or any other aspect of their design). As Marion Bowman demonstrates in her chapter in this book, candles and lights ‘convey, express or produce a range of purposes, meanings and emotions’, and they can do so ‘with or without precise articulation of the exact meaning attributed to what is being done’ (Bowman, this volume). Memory objects can also be constructed or maintained entirely online. A YouTube video, for example, can be created to commemorate a life, place or event.When a Facebook user dies, his or her existing profile remains online, still connected to the living.This kind of “continuing bond” with the dead can prove traumatic for some, and Facebook now allows next-of-kin to delete or “memorialise” pages to limit and control the networks of the dead (Facebook n.d.). Mourners are also creating memory objects and ritual practices in virtual worlds, as Anna Haverinen has shown in her work on memorialisation in the virtual world of Second Life (2014). Funeral events are now frequently held in game settings, and visitors to Second Life can find memorial chapels, graveyards, statues and crypts. Haverinen interviewed a group of friends at a cave in Second Life that had belonged to a role-player called Yuki.When Yuki died, her Second Life friends redecorated her cave as a memorial place, displaying a slideshow of photographs of both the game character and the player herself.They also added a burial mound, ‘in order for it to resemble an actual memorial familiar from the offline world’ (2014: 167) – partly as a substitute grave for those who would never be able to visit Yuki’s home country offline.Yuki’s story ends with a fascinating twist, as her friends begin wondering if her tragic death – which showed a number of curious inconsistencies – might have been a hoax, a dramatic way to move on from the community without breaking character. Such events are not unusual online, but in this case Haverinen’s interviewees claim not to mind too much. After all, they say, they did enjoy the role-play. These case studies of memorialisation can all be understood as material objects, using the definitions introduced earlier. At the most straightforward of Horst and Miller’s three levels, “digital infrastructure of technology”, physical objects are involved in their production, maintenance and access: QR codes in ink or stone, mobile phones with touch screens, high-powered computers capable of rendering the graphics of virtual worlds, 3D-printed plastic spheres hiding physical lights and speakers, and so on. At the “digital content” level, photographs, videos and audio recordings are preserved and circulated through these memorials, inserted into virtual worlds and social media profiles and connected to physical objects. Email accounts and other online repositories of content become troublesome legacies for the bereaved, who must find out how to access them and decide what they are willing to save or delete. Digital Bibles are often designed to train the user to read and think in new ways, and the common practice of communicating with the dead through Facebook is arguably encouraged by the design of that social networking site (Walter 2015). This brings us to the third level of materiality,“digital context”: the architecture of Facebook positions us within a network of contacts that includes both the living and the dead, provides us with a range of options for more or less public communication, and uses algorithms to calculate which of our communications 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 96 07-10-2016 16:44:27 Digital media and material religion 97 should be seen by which of our connections. Our social environment is structured by the media we use, even if we are unaware of the boundaries placed around us. Conclusion: the production of digital objects In his contribution to this volume, David Morgan suggests analysing the “production” of a material object in three stages: medium, design and manufacture. To conclude this chapter we will discuss each of these in turn, bringing together observations from the foregoing examples. As we have seen, designers pay careful attention to the strengths and weaknesses of different media. In the case of Uncover, a range of media are combined into one product, reflecting particular understandings of how students think. As a paper book, Uncover can be framed as a gift to read with a friend; as a series of videos, it can offer direct, relatable instruction. YouVersion chose to develop a mobile app instead, using digital media to provide easy access to the text and encouraging collaborative and performative reading through social media. Memorials can be physical (the deceased’s mobile phone), augmented (graves with QR codes), virtual (memory caves in Second Life) or networked (Facebook profile pages), or they can combine physical and digital in more nuanced ways, like Story Shell’s use of plastic, paper, lights and audio recordings (Moncur et al. 2015). All of these examples try to exploit the affordances and minimise the limitations of particular media. We have also seen examples of careful design.The creators of these books and memorials are trying to produce something that will resonate with and shape their target audiences. Adding QR codes to graves requires careful consideration, because users need to feel comfortable accessing them without breaking norms of graveyard conduct or disturbing other visitors. Yuki’s cave included visual elements designed to help visitors recognise the site as a grave, and Story Shell’s shape, feel and function were all designed to encourage Mayra to use the object, find it comforting and experience Andrew’s presence. Uncover and YouVersion’s Bible App are explicitly designed to change how users think: recipients are meant to be attracted into conversation by Uncover’s look and content, while reading activity is tracked, analysed and prompted by the Bible App. Design does not determine reception, of course, and a thorough study of these objects would need to include attention to how users appropriate, resist or reject them – themes considered in the later stages of “classification” and “circulation” in Morgan’s model of material analysis. Analysis of manufacture includes the techniques, technologies and networks of an object’s production and trade. QR codes can be added to graves only by experienced stonecarvers, so in this case digital technology is used to reinforce the dominance of an established industry. In contrast, Yuki’s cave was created within Second Life by volunteer users of that virtual world, without any need to involve traditional memorial industries. Story Shell was produced through 3D printing, which also gives designers direct access to the processes and resources of manufacturing. YouVersion is a more complicated example: it is 15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 97 07-10-2016 16:44:27 98 Tim Hutchings a digital product created by programmers, rather than printers, which liberates the company from dependence on the infrastructure of the publishing industry; however, this has enabled greater centralisation of control within the religious production economy.YouVersion is owned by the megachurch Life.Church, so its digital Bibles are being produced inside a Christian institution. In the digital marketplace, traditionally independent publishers like the United Bible Societies have been reduced to content producers for church-owned apps. The study of material religion argues that religious practices, identities and relationships – including relationships between texts and readers, or between the living and the dead – are shaped by and enacted through material objects. Electronic and digital media have often been incorporated within considerations of the materiality of religion, and this essay has tried to demonstrate that this inclusiveness can be justified. Digital Bibles and memorials are material objects, both physically and functionally.They are created through physical processes, and made out of physical materials, but they can also – more interestingly – be shown to constrain and structure our action and relationships, just as material objects do. They can also be profitably studied through application of the methods of material analysis, as shown here using the first stage of David Morgan’s nine-step model. At the same time, there are significant and meaningful differences for users between Bible apps and paper Bibles, or virtual world memorials and QR-code gravestones. Designers and users reflect at length on the opportunities, affordances and limitations of different digital and physical media, and our analysis of digital materiality cannot overlook those debates. The material approach also helps to remind us of the embeddedness of religious content, ideas and practices in wider contexts. Bibles and memorials are produced in a specific medium by designers and manufacturers, and to understand them as material objects we have to consider a wide range of issues that are not exclusive to religion: media affordances, access to production systems, the structure of the marketplace, cultural understandings of gifts and obligations, and many other issues. Memorials can play a role in religious ritual, symbolically express religious ideas and connect the bereaved with an afterlife, but the need for memory objects is shared across religious and non-religious groups. As this chapter has tried to demonstrate, materiality can be the point of contact between the sociology of religion and research in anthropology, media studies, the digital humanities, design studies, memory studies and more.This is, perhaps, the most important advantage that the material turn can offer to the study of religion. Works cited Arthur, Chris. 2005. ‘Material Religion in Cyberspace’. 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