Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Communing With Compromise: Mormonism And The Early Internet, Gavin Feller

Mormon Studies Review

As an emerging technology, the internet stirred a fascinating brew of excitement, anxiety, and fear for Jew and Gentile.1 It challenged both grassroots and top-down notions of intimacy, authenticity, and control. For Mormonism, a religion whose chronology parallels uncannily the development of electronic communication technologies, the internet joins a host of media dripping with ambivalence. In tracing the contours of Mormonism’s evolving and uneasy relationship with the twentieth-century internet—from early listserv communities to institutional web development—this brief essay presents only a morsel of the richness the religion offers for the study of technology, culture, and power.