Role of the Church in Information Society Development

  1. Lemma
  2. Uloga crkve u razvoju informacionog drustva
  3. Serbian
  4. Stevanovic, Aleksandra
  5. Modes of interaction - Orthodox view on technology and engineering
  6. 23-12-2016
  7. Subotic, Oliver [Author]. Place and Role of the Church in Information Society Development
  8. Covek i tehnologija
    1. Subotic, Oliver
  9. Orthodoxy and information technologies
  10. 7/12/2016
    1. On 23 March 2012, in the Conference Hall of the Municipality of Stari grad in Belgrade, "e-Development Conference 2012" was held. It was dedicated to the development of information society in Serbia and diverse representatives of relevant national, social, and scientific institutions participated. On behalf of the Center for Research and Application of Modern Technologies, deacon Dr. Oliver Subotic discussed "Place and Role of the Church in the Development of a Modern Information Society in Serbia".

      In his presentation, Dr. Subotic pointed out that the attitude of the Church towards the use of information and communication technology is affirmative, but critical. He emphasized that the Church is interested in the development of information society in a good direction because it is interested in man and his position in contemporary society. He accentuated some concrete instances in practice to support this view and in the end said that Serbian Orthodox Church has been and will be open to collaboration with all institutions of importance when it comes to the development of information society in a way that preserves the dignity of personality.

      The speech of deacon Dr. Subotic was afterwards presented on his website "Man and Technology". Although development of the modern technological society may appear unrelated to the Church, the point is that "information society" is a primarily sociological phenomenon, and therefore it is tightly connected to the Church which is interested in man, in all the dimensions. Accordingly, no society can exist without man and that is why it insists on the stance that man's personality is absolutely irreducible to anything impersonal and objective.

      Information technologies do improve the quality of human work and life, that is, optimize and improve production processes and enable diverse actions. This is certainly a significant step forward. But if these improvements are uncritically accepted, it can, for instance, lead to the idea of complete workers replacement with the machine as the center of society. Due to that, critical aspect is of crucial importance.

      Development of the Information Society opens complex issues, not easily resolved without considering certain structural deviations. A decade ago, Serbian Orthodox Church opened a public discourse concerned with citizens' privacy and the protection of their dignity. At that time, unfortunately, awareness was not raised. Furthermore, the Church was first to initiate professional and scientific conferences in the field of electronic privacy. That is, historically speaking, a huge contribution to the development of the information society, with regard to dignity and freedom of personality.

      Finally, it should be emphasized that the Church is always open to cooperation. Accordingly, Serbian Orthodox Church has a long-standing cooperation with the Society for Information in various fields, and then with Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names (RNIDS), with a very fruitful cooperation achieved in the field of finding solutions for a Cyrillic internet domain names, and there is also cooperation with iT academic institutions, iT magazines and the like. That kind of openness to cooperation (while keeping the affirmative-critical attitude) continues in the future, to the benefit of all people.