Worship, Faith, and Evangelism

Abstract

While some in the CSCW community have researched the values in technology design and engineering practices, the underlying ideologies that reinforce and protect those values remain under-explored. This paper seeks to address this gap by identifying a common ideological framework that appears across four engineering endeavors: the OLPC Project, the National Day of Civic Hacking, the Fixit Clinic, and the Stanford d.school. We found that all four of these communities utilized elements of religious practice to affirm their membership and shared vision. We describe the forms of worship we saw in these engineering worlds, their practices of evangelism, and the ways in which they addressed doubt. We also demonstrate the role mythologies play as ideologically charged narratives. Our discussion of these parallels illuminates the extent and consequences of quasi-religious practices in engineering worlds and illustrates the utility of using religion as a 'lens' for understanding ideological commitments in engineering culture.

Holy Tweets

“…Interviews were conducted through Microsoft Teams, in Arabic (a native language for the authors and participants); each lasted from 60 to 90 minutes on average. Code-switching did occur, but Arabic remained the language that was primarily spoken 11 . During the interviews, we started with high-level questions such as "how often do you check check Twitter?…”

“…In reviewing relevant research, we engage with general HCI and CSCW work on the use of technology that supports religious activities, rituals and literature on techno-spiritual practices [11,13,60,61,63,64]. Offering a rich introduction to this category, Genevieve Bell's ethnographic essay No more SMS from Jesus: ubicomp, religion and technospiritual practices critically interrogates the ways cultural and ritual practices shape people's relationships to technology in urban Asia based on research with 100 different Asian households [13].…”

“…Alnasser's [48] research on designing ICTs to support positive ageing experiences in Saudi Arabia illustrates the religious aspect of technology use by the older people, for example, using WhatsApp to exchange morning and evening prayers. These behaviors are not unique to Islam, Ames et al [11] look at Judeo-Christian religious frameworks to uncover deep-rooted connections between engineering practices and discourses and religion as a general means of surfacing a few "quasi-religious" behaviors, such as practices of worship and evangelism in influencing people to convert to a specific approach or process (e.g., Design Thinking approach or volunteering at hackathons). These findings illustrate the ways in which religion and its concepts are deep-seated within cultures outside ones faith community including engineering cultures.…”

Performing Technocapitalism

“…referring to Dandridge et al 1980: 77). According to Ames et al (2015), the foundational story of a technological endeavor, in particular, possesses community-building effects. Such a story is often "ritualistically circulated within the community", producing religious-like "feelings of awe, transcendence, and connection to a greater purpose" (ibid.…”

Who Cares for Agile Work? In/Visibilized Work Practices and Their Emancipatory Potential

“…Therefore, affect/emotion stand for 7 Several scholars claim that the global discourses on innovation and making subjectify people into entrepreneurial citizens. They demonstrate how the visions, desires, hopes -the utopian language of science, technology and innovation narratives in general -have crucial effects on industrial companies, labour processes and on the employees themselves [47][48][49][50][51].…”