It’s a most interesting question how The Web changes thought. The characteristics of Web behaviour now involve participation, linking and immediate access to information.

The kind of thinking that requires quietness alone may not be best served by The Web. Traditional learning will often involve absorbing the ideas in a book, thinking about those ideas and then perhaps internalizing those ideas in the form of an essay.

But just because Web thinking is different does not necessarily make it less valuable. Traditional learning, after all, also requires a sense of perspective. It requires the association of ideas as well as the pursuit of ideas. It requires making leaps of faith and finding unexpected connections. So we must be wary of limiting what we regard as useful thought only to those procedures that our particular generation have grown up with and been educated in. Learning does not have to take place alone in a silent library necessarily.

The interactive culture and cross-cultural possibilities of The Internet seem to be a new development in learning. We should guard against making easy judgements about whether or not the Web assists learning or hinders it. This is because appropriate learning for one age may not be so appropriate to another. An Internet age expects and requires different behaviours – less isolation, more linking, more group discovery and more collaborative thinking, for instance.

And if the Web is changing how we think, it is probably also changing how we think about God. But then human thought on the nature of God has probably never been static. It depends to some extent on the tools available to us. A cave-man might think in terms of cave painting. Someone who can read and has access to printed texts may make more reference to the written word than someone who cannot read. And one would expect a Web connection to have theological implications too, I think.

It may be too soon in the history of The Internet to be able to assess the various ways in which religious thought will adapt to and be shaped by a connected world. But it’s something to be thinking about, either off-line or on-line.

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