Zandbergen, D. (2012). Fulfilling the Sacred Potential of Technology. New Edge Technophilia, Consumerism, and Spirituality in Silicon Valle. In D. Houtman & B. Meyer (Eds.), Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (pp. 356-378). New York: Fordham University Press.

This chapter looks at the ‘New Edge’ culture of the San Francisco Bay Area – a cross-over between New Age and high tech cultural environments. It argues that New Edge culture is engaged in a struggle over the definition of the nature of the ‘things’ that are produced by the Silicon Valley industries: while defining computer technologies as sacred technologies, New Edge culture is at times opposed to the conventional treatment by corporate industries of computer technologies as consumer products. At other times, however, the New Edge imagines the sacred potential of computer technologies in surprising harmony with the consumerist ethos of the Silicon Valley industries. The aim of this chapter is to gain insight into the circumstances in which New Edge forges relationships between the sacred and the corporate, the materialistic and the spiritual.

You can download the chapter here.

The final dissertation about this topic can be found here.