Internet and Decorporation: Sensory Reconfigurations of the Body in the Techno-Realist Age

Abstract

This article examines how Internet technologies reconfigure human sensory experience and induce decorporation—the experiential dissociation of consciousness from the physical body. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and theological anthropology, the study demonstrates that digital immersion amplifies certain senses (vision, hearing) while anesthetizing others (touch, kinesthesia), disrupting the sensory balance essential to integrated human perception. This sensory reconfiguration, combined with prolonged physical stasis before screens, produces a dualistic self-experience wherein consciousness appears detached from bodily existence. The analysis identifies ideological support for this phenomenon in transhumanist philosophies that reconceptualize personhood as information rather than embodied reality. Against these neo-gnostic visions, the article proposes a techno-realist framework grounded in Christian theological anthropology that affirms both technology’s formative power and the irreducible significance of embodied existence, calling for technological asceticism and practices preserving psychosomatic unity.

1. Introduction

The rapid proliferation of digital technologies over the past three decades has fundamentally altered human experience, reshaping not only how we communicate but how we perceive ourselves, our bodies, and our relationship to the material world. As Internet usage has become ubiquitous—with the average person in developed nations spending more than six hours daily engaged with digital screens (Kemp 2024)—questions about the anthropological and theological implications of this technological immersion have become increasingly urgent. The phenomenon of individuals sitting immobilized before screens, their consciousness apparently transported into virtual spaces while their bodies remain inert, presents a striking challenge to traditional understandings of human personhood as an integrated psychosomatic unity.

This article addresses a critical gap in religious scholarship on technology: while substantial work exists on the ethical implications of digital technologies (Campbell 2013; Spadaro 2014), less attention has been paid to how these technologies fundamentally reconfigure sensory experience and embodied existence in ways that challenge core theological commitments to the goodness and necessity of bodily life. This article focuses specifically on Christian theological anthropology while recognizing that other religious traditions offer different frameworks for engaging these questions—a limitation we acknowledge and an avenue for future comparative research.

Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, particularly his concept of technological extensions and sensory ratios (McLuhan 1964, 1988), alongside contemporary scholarship on digital embodiment and transhumanist ideology, this article argues that Internet use engenders two interconnected phenomena: sensory reconfiguration, in which visual and auditory senses are amplified while tactile and kinesthetic senses are diminished, and decorporation, a dissociative state in which consciousness appears detached from the physical body. Furthermore, these experiential shifts are supported by and reinforce transhumanist ideologies that conceptualize human personhood as informational rather than embodied, a worldview fundamentally at odds with Christian theological anthropology.

This study employs a multi-method interdisciplinary approach combining theoretical analysis, phenomenological investigation, and theological reflection to examine how Internet technologies affect human embodiment and sensory experience. The methodology comprises four integrated components. Section 1 establishes the theoretical framework by examining McLuhan’s media theory and the Techno-Realist Manifesto’s recognition of technology’s non-neutrality. Section 2 analyzes how digital technologies reconfigure sensory experience, drawing on concepts of sensory balance and the “common sense” (sensus communis). Section 3 investigates the phenomenon of decorporation in Internet use, examining how virtual mobility creates an experiential dissociation from the physical body. Section 4 proposes a techno-realist approach informed by theological anthropology that affirms both the formative power of technology and the irreducible significance of embodied existence. The article concludes by discussing implications for religious practice and suggesting directions for future research.

2. Analysis

2.1. Theoretical Framework: McLuhan and the Non-Neutrality of Technology

2.1.1. The Medium as Message

To understand the impact of Internet technologies on human experience, we must first recognize that technologies are not neutral tools that leave their users unchanged. Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim, “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964), captures this insight; the technological means of communication shapes human perception and cognition as powerfully as, if not more powerfully than, the content transmitted through it. McLuhan argued that media have “a determining impact on the balance of human perceptions” (Petcu 2002, p. 76), restructuring the “sensory ratios” by which humans engage with reality.

Consider a simple example: expressing love through a telephone call, a handwritten letter, or a face-to-face conversation constitutes three fundamentally different experiences, not merely three equivalent vehicles for identical content. Each medium privileges certain sensory modalities—voice alone, visual text, or multisensory presence—and thereby shapes both the expression and reception of emotion differently. The medium carries its own implicit message about the nature of communication, relationship, and presence.

McLuhan’s insight parallels theological recognition that form and content cannot be separated, that the mode of revelation matters as much as what is revealed. Just as the Incarnation proclaims that the medium (embodied existence) is inseparable from the message (divine love), so too technological media embed messages about what it means to be human, to communicate, to be present to another.

2.1.2. Technology as Environment

A key challenge in analyzing technological impact is that technology has become so pervasive as to constitute our environment, rendering its effects nearly invisible. As McLuhan observed, technology “is our environment” and “like any environment (we could make a comparison with the air that surrounds us, of whose presence we are no longer aware), it is hidden from us” (McDonald 2003). We must consciously direct attention toward our technological medium to perceive how it shapes us—a task analogous to asking a fish to analyze water.

McDonald (2003) recognizes that contemporary communications technology represents a great good that nevertheless gives rise to an equally great evil, necessitating an asceticism that defends us against the abuse of technology. This spiritual discipline of technological awareness resonates with monastic traditions of vigilance and discernment, suggesting that engaging technology wisely requires cultivating habits of critical distance and self-examination.

2.1.3. Technological Extensions and the Loss of Balance

McLuhan’s concept of technological extension provides crucial insight into how media reshape human experience. He argues that “all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, a sense, or a function” (McLuhan [1969] 1997, p. 230). However, this amplification comes at a cost: “the central nervous system seems to institute a protective numbing of the affected area, insulating or anesthetizing it to protect it from consciousness of what is happening to it” (McLuhan [1969] 1997, p. 230).

McLuhan terms this phenomenon “Narcissus narcosis”—a form of self-hypnosis whereby humans remain as unaware of the psychic and social effects of technology as a fish is of the water in which it swims. (McLuhan 1964) The Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection, provides the archetype; we become so fascinated with our technological extensions that we fail to notice how they alter us. The narcotic quality of technology—its capacity to numb our awareness of its effects—makes critical reflection both necessary and difficult.

The theological implications are significant. If technologies reshape sensory experience and thereby alter how humans perceive reality, then they also affect how humans perceive divine presence and engage in spiritual practice. Worship, prayer, sacramental participation—all embodied practices rooted in specific sensory modalities—cannot remain unchanged when the sensory ratios of practitioners have been radically reconfigured by technological immersion.

3. Sensory Reconfiguration in the Digital Age

3.1. The Doctrine of Sensus Communis

Before examining how Internet technologies reconfigure sensory experience, we must understand the classical and Christian conception of sensory unity. Medieval theologians, drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima, articulated the doctrine of the sensus communis (common sense)—not common sense as popular wisdom, but the human capacity to integrate data from multiple sensory modalities into unified perception (Aquinas [1265–1274] 1947).

Aristotle compared sensory balance to the tuning of a lyre; if one string is stretched too tightly, harmony is destroyed. Similarly, if one sensory organ is overexcited, “the intensity or proportion of its sensibility is destroyed,” and this proportion constitutes the very nature of that sense (Aristotle 1984, De Anima Sct. III, p. 2).

The sensus communis translates experiences from one sensory modality to others, presenting the result to consciousness as integrated perception. This integrative capacity can be trained into habits—habits shaped significantly by the technologies with which humans interact.

McDonald (2003), analyzing McLuhan’s debt to Thomistic anthropology, emphasizes that human personhood presupposes this “unity and harmony of the senses.” When technological extensions disrupt sensory balance by amplifying certain senses while anesthetizing others, they threaten the integrated functioning that constitutes properly human perception.

3.2. The Chair: A Preliminary Technology of Decorporation

To understand Internet-induced sensory reconfiguration, we must first examine a more basic technology: the chair. While seemingly innocuous, the chair exemplifies how technologies reshape bodily experience and sensory awareness. As Constantineau (2003) observes, sitting in a chair induces “a kind of numbness, an anesthesia of the human body” analogous to the effects of dental anesthesia. Just as local anesthetic progressively numbs the body, so prolonged sitting desensitizes the entire body—buttocks, feet, back—and eventually produces a state of reduced proprioceptive and kinesthetic awareness.

This numbing effect reorganizes the sensory system: “Chairs promote activity in the head but desensitize the body” (Constantineau 2003). The seated person, deprived of kinesthetic and tactile input, increasingly relies on vision and hearing as primary sources of information. The other senses “atrophy” in those who spend extensive time seated, leading them to “rely on eyes as the main source of perception” (Constantineau 2003).

The modern proliferation of sitting—in offices, vehicles, homes, and before screens—represents a massive historical shift in bodily comportment with profound sensory consequences. The back pain, bone stiffness, and muscle weakness associated with a sedentary lifestyle constitute merely the most obvious symptoms. More subtle is the gradual deadening of bodily awareness, the progressive dissociation of consciousness from the body’s tacit knowledge.

From a theological perspective, this desensitization matters profoundly. Christian spirituality has consistently emphasized bodily practices—fasting, prostration, liturgical movement, pilgrimage—as essential to spiritual formation. The Desert Fathers’ recognition that posture affects prayer, the liturgical choreography of Orthodox worship, and the Catholic tradition of Eucharistic genuflection—all presume that bodily awareness and spiritual awareness interpenetrate. A culture of bodily numbness necessarily impacts spiritual receptivity.

3.3. Internet Use and the Amplification of Distance Senses

Internet engagement intensifies the sensory reorganization initiated by sitting. The person surfing the Internet experiences radical narrowing of sensory input: vision and hearing are amplified, while touch, smell, taste, and kinesthetic awareness fade to near-zero. As Constantineau (2003) notes, the Internet user “will hear and feel almost nothing of what is happening around him”—not only because of the screen’s absorptive fascination, but because the body’s other senses have been effectively anesthetized.

This represents what McLuhan calls the disruption of the “precious ring of the senses” (McLuhan 1975)—the natural harmony and balance that characterize properly human perception. When one sense operates “at the highest level of intensity, it can act as an anesthetic for the other senses… The result is a rupture in the relations between the senses, a kind of loss of identity” (McLuhan 1975, pp. 56–57).

The theological implications extend beyond the loss of full sensory engagement with created reality. Christian tradition affirms that divine presence can be encountered through all sensory modalities—the fragrance of incense, the taste of Eucharistic elements, the tactile experience of blessing and anointing, the kinesthetic sense of bowing or kneeling. If Internet immersion progressively atrophies non-visual, non-auditory senses, it diminishes the sensory repertoire available for encountering the sacred.

Moreover, Christian theology affirms the goodness of embodied, sensory existence. The doctrine of Creation proclaims that God created the material world and declared it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). The Incarnation—God assuming flesh—represents Christianity’s most radical affirmation of bodily existence. Any technology that induces dissociation from bodily, sensory experience, therefore moves users away from, rather than toward, the mode of existence God intended and incarnationally validated.

Recent empirical studies support these phenomenological observations. Research using VR embodiment found that virtual engagement significantly reduced body awareness compared to physical interaction, even when participants embodied photorealistic avatars matching their own appearance (Döllinger et al. 2023; Moura et al. 2022). Screen time correlates with reduced physical self-concept and body dissatisfaction in adolescents, independent of content consumed (Suchert et al. 2016). These findings empirically demonstrate that digital immersion affects proprioceptive and kinesthetic awareness, supporting McLuhan’s theoretical framework regarding sensory reconfiguration.

Moyse (2021) demonstrates theologically how embodied practices—especially in childhood formation—are not ancillary to spiritual development but constitutive of it. Children learn to pray through bodily practices (folding hands, bowing heads, processing) that integrate physical and spiritual awareness. If digital culture atrophies the bodily capacities these practices presume, spiritual formation itself is compromised.

3.4. The Illusion of Content Neutrality

McLuhan observed that our habitual response to media—focusing exclusively on content while ignoring the medium itself—represents “the numb stance of the technological idiot” (McLuhan 1964, p. 155). We attend to what is said while ignoring how the mode of communication reshapes both speaker and listener. McLuhan compares media content to “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (McLuhan 1964, p. 155)—a distraction preventing us from noticing the real impact of the medium itself.

This insight challenges common pastoral responses to technology that focus exclusively on content moderation—filtering harmful websites, monitoring children’s online activities, and avoiding immoral content. While content certainly matters, the medium itself—prolonged screen engagement that reconfigures sensory ratios and induces bodily dissociation—shapes users profoundly regardless of whether they view morally upright or morally problematic content. A person spending six hours daily reading Scripture online still experiences the sensory reconfiguration and decorporation inherent in extended screen time.

Religious leaders and educators must therefore attend not only to what people encounter online, but to how online engagement itself reshapes perception, embodiment, and spiritual capacity. The medium is indeed the message.

4. The Phenomenon of Decorporation

Having established how Internet technologies reconfigure sensory experience—amplifying vision and hearing while anesthetizing touch, kinesthesia, and proprioception—we now examine the existential consequence of this reconfiguration: the phenomenon of decorporation, wherein consciousness appears experientially detached from the physical body.

4.1. Virtual Mobility and Bodily Inactivity

A central paradox of Internet experience is the combination of apparent mobility with actual physical stasis. The Internet user who “travels” from website to website, who “visits” virtual cafés or explores Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), who instantaneously “moves” from New York to Tokyo with a mouse-click, remains throughout entirely immobile, seated before a screen. This disjunction between experienced movement and actual immobility constitutes decorporation—the experiential dissociation of consciousness from the physical body.

Those communicating in virtual environments lack the embodied dimensions of face-to-face interaction: handshakes, embraces, kisses, or the subtle communication of “body language.” Those navigating virtual worlds can transcend physical limitations—passing through walls, flying, teleporting instantaneously across vast distances—precisely because these are movements of representation, not of actual bodies. The strongest sensation of transcending bodily limits comes from the collapse of physical distance; while time and distance constrain movement in physical space, virtual “travel” occurs at the speed of light.

Yet this instantaneousness is, as Breton (1995) notes, “to a certain extent, an illusion,” characteristic of communications rather than transportation. For centuries, communication and transportation were inseparable—to communicate with someone required traveling to them. Modern telecommunications severed this connection, enabling the transmission of minds and messages at unprecedented speeds while bodies remain stationary. The Internet extends this capacity further, allowing users to transmit “something of themselves (the spirit, for example)” in seemingly magical fashion (Levinson 1997), giving rise to the image of “online angels”—disembodied minds flitting through cyberspace.

The transhumanist celebration of this disembodiment rests on a metaphysical error: treating consciousness as a substance rather than a property, as an independently existing thing rather than an activity of an embodied person. As Searle (1980) demonstrated in his Chinese Room argument, information processing alone does not constitute consciousness or personhood—there is no ‘ghost in the machine’ that could be extracted and uploaded elsewhere. Consciousness is not something we have (like software) but something we are as embodied beings.

4.2. The Experience of Bodily Superfluity

This power to project consciousness while the body remains immobile produces a distinctive phenomenology; the body comes to feel “cumbersome and useless”, requiring feeding, care, and maintenance, when consciousness would prefer to float free (Le Breton 1999, pp. 73–74). The angelic fantasy—pure mind unencumbered by flesh—finds technological expression in cyberspace. As Le Breton observes, “faceless, bodiless communication encourages multiple identities, the fragmentation of the subject engaged in a series of virtual encounters for which he or she assumes a different name each time, even an age, sex, or profession chosen according to circumstances” (Le Breton 1999, p. 74). The body, with its gender, age, ethnic features, and physical limitations, can be edited, concealed, or entirely replaced by self-created avatars.

Cyberculture advocates often celebrate this as liberation—freedom from the constraints and stigmas attached to particular bodies. Yet from a theological perspective, this represents a dangerous gnosticism, echoing ancient heresies that dismissed embodiment as imprisonment rather than a gift. The Christian tradition affirms that humans are not souls trapped in bodies, but ensouled bodies or embodied souls—psychosomatic unities in which body and spirit interpenetrate. The Resurrection, central to Christian hope, involves the resurrection of the body, not escape from it. Any technology or ideology promoting bodily transcendence as an ideal contradicts this core theological commitment.

4.3. Theological Anthropology and the Psychosomatic Unity

Christian theological anthropology insists on fundamental body-soul unity, rejecting Platonic or gnostic dualisms. Genesis presents human creation through divine inbreathing into formed dust (Genesis 2:7), while the Incarnation radically affirms the Word became flesh (John 1:14).

Contemporary theology continues this emphasis. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body (Paul 1997) articulates how bodiliness is intrinsic to personhood and to the capacity for self-gift. The body is not an instrument the person uses, but part of who the person is—the locus of encounter, communication, and love. Orthodox theologian Larchet ([2001] 2006) emphasizes that salvation involves the entire human person, body and soul together, and that spiritual practices must engage bodily as well as mental dimensions.

Beyond phenomenological description, Christian theological anthropology makes ontological claims about human nature. The human person is understood as a substantial unity of body and soul—not two separate substances temporarily conjoined, but a single composite substance in which matter and form are intrinsically united (Aquinas [1265–1274] 1947, Summa Theologica, vol. I, pp. 75–76). The soul is the forma corporis, the substantial form that actualizes the body and makes it specifically human. Body and soul are not merely accidentally related (like a sailor in a ship, as Plato suggested) but essentially related; the soul is naturally ordained to be united with the body, and the body is the necessary expression of the soul’s powers.

This ontological unity has several implications. First, the human person is not reducible to either material or immaterial components alone—neither pure physicality nor pure consciousness, but an integrated reality transcending both reductionisms. Second, embodiment is not accidental or temporary but essential to human personhood; even in the intermediate state between death and resurrection, the separated soul exists in an unnatural condition, awaiting bodily reunion. Third, the body is not an instrument the person uses but part of what the person is—the locus of personhood, not merely its vehicle.

This metaphysical framework stands in sharp contrast to transhumanist anthropology, which conceptualizes personhood as fundamentally informational. For transhumanism, the human person is essentially a pattern of information—neural connections, memories, personality traits—that could theoretically be instantiated in different substrates (biological neurons, silicon chips, digital networks). The body becomes mere ‘hardware’ for consciousness ‘software,’ replaceable and ultimately dispensable (Moravec 1988; Kurzweil 2005). Christian anthropology denies this reducibility; the person is not information encoded in a body but an embodied reality whose consciousness, identity, and capacities are intrinsically corporeal.

Decorporation—the experiential dissociation of consciousness from body induced by prolonged Internet immersion—therefore represents not merely a phenomenological curiosity but a theological problem. It habituates users to a dualistic self-experience at odds with the psychosomatic unity Christianity affirms, potentially diminishing capacity for embodied prayer, sacramental participation, and the concrete works of mercy that constitute Christian discipleship.

4.4. Transhumanist Metaphysics and the Denial of Embodiment

To understand decorporation’s ideological support, we must examine transhumanism’s explicit metaphysical claims about personhood. Transhumanist philosophers like Moravec (1988), Kurzweil (2005), and Bostrom (2005) argue that human consciousness is fundamentally substrate-independent—that personal identity consists of informational patterns that could, in principle, be transferred to non-biological substrates through ‘mind uploading’ or ‘whole brain emulation.’

This position entails three interconnected claims. (1) Dualist separability: Mind and body are sufficiently distinct that consciousness can exist independently of its current biological substrate. (2) Informational reduction: Personal identity reduces to patterns of information (neural connectivity, memories, behavioral dispositions) rather than consisting in the substantial unity of body and soul. (3) Technological transcendence: Since personhood is informational, technological means can preserve, enhance, or transfer it across substrates, achieving functional immortality.

Each claim contradicts Christian theological anthropology’s core commitments.

Against dualist separability: Christian anthropology affirms the soul’s spirituality and immortality while insisting the soul is naturally ordained to bodily union. The soul separated from the body exists in an incomplete, unnatural state—it is not a person in the full sense until reunited with the body in resurrection (Aquinas [1265–1274] 1947, Summa Theologica vol. I, p. 76, a. 1). Transhumanism’s error lies in treating temporary separability (which Christian theology affirms between death and resurrection) as evidence for natural or desirable separability.

Against informational reduction: Christian anthropology maintains that persons are substantial unities, not reducible to information patterns. While consciousness involves informational processing, the person is not identical to those processes any more than a musician is identical to the notes they play. Searle’s (1980) Chinese Room argument demonstrates this philosophically: syntactic symbol manipulation (information processing) does not constitute semantic understanding (consciousness). A computer perfectly simulating neural firing patterns would not thereby become conscious or personal. Personhood requires not just information but embodied, intentional consciousness—what phenomenologists call ‘being-in-the-world’ (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962).

Against technological transcendence: If personhood consists of psychosomatic unity rather than information patterns, then ‘uploading’ consciousness represents not preservation but destruction. The uploaded ‘copy’ would be, at best, a simulacrum—information about a person, not the person themselves. Christian hope centers not on technological preservation of informational patterns but on divine resurrection of the body, affirming that authentic human existence requires embodiment (1 Corinthians 15:35–44). Technology can support human flourishing, but cannot replace or transcend the embodied nature God established at creation and redeemed in Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection.

Transhumanism’s appeal partly derives from legitimate concerns—mortality, suffering, human limitation. Christian theology shares concern for these realities but offers fundamentally different responses: not technological transcendence of embodiment but divine redemption through embodiment, not escape from finitude but transfiguration within it. The resurrected body in Christian eschatology is not discarded flesh but transformed flesh—embodiment perfected, not abolished (Bynum 1995).

5. Toward a Techno-Realist Approach Grounded in Theological Anthropology

The preceding analysis reveals a troubling convergence; Internet technologies that phenomenologically induce decorporation, combined with transhumanist ideologies that philosophically valorize disembodiment, together undermine the psychosomatic unity Christianity affirms as essential to human personhood. The question remains: how should Christian communities respond? We now turn to constructive proposals for a techno-realist approach.

5.1. Recognizing Technology’s Formative Power

A techno-realist approach begins by acknowledging what McLuhan and the Techno-Realist Manifesto demonstrate; technologies are not neutral tools but formative powers that reshape users. Internet technologies reorganize sensory ratios, induce decorporation, and habituate users to dualistic self-experience. These effects occur regardless of content consumed—they are inherent in the medium itself.

For religious communities, this recognition demands moving beyond content-focused approaches to technology (filtering objectionable material) toward medium-conscious approaches that consider how technologies reshape perception, embodiment, and spiritual capacity. Pastoral care must address not only what people encounter online, but how online engagement affects their ability to pray, participate in liturgy, practice corporal works of mercy, and maintain the psychosomatic unity essential to Christian anthropology.

5.2. Practicing Technological Asceticism

McDonald (2003) calls for “an asceticism that defends us against the abuse of technology.” Drawing on monasticism’s wisdom about spiritual discipline, this technological asceticism involves cultivating practices that maintain embodied awareness and sensory balance despite technological pressures toward decorporation.

Concrete practices might include the following:

• Regular digital fasts: Periods of abstinence from screens to restore bodily awareness and sensory balance, analogous to fasting from food. Research demonstrates measurable benefits: participants in structured digital detox interventions report reduced stress, improved sleep quality, and enhanced present-moment awareness, though sustained behavior change requires community support and positive alternatives (Radtke et al. 2022; Schmuck 2020). Church-based digital fasts show particular effectiveness when combined with substitute practices like family meals and embodied prayer.
• Liturgical and embodied prayer: Prioritizing prayer forms engaging the whole body—prostrations, genuflections, processions, liturgical dance—as counterweights to disembodied digital experience. Empirical studies confirm that embodied spiritual practices enhance religious experience and psychological well-being more effectively than cognitive-only approaches (Luhrmann 2020; Moyse 2021).
• Contemplative practices: Meditation and contemplation that cultivate interior silence and awareness, resisting technology’s sensory overstimulation. Mindfulness-based interventions successfully counteract digital distraction, improving attention regulation and reducing technology-induced anxiety.
• Manual work and craftsmanship: Engaging hands in physical making (cooking, gardening, carpentry), reawakening tactile and kinesthetic senses atrophied by digital immersion. Occupational therapy research demonstrates that hands-on creative activities restore proprioceptive awareness and combat dissociative states associated with excessive screen time (Crawford 2009).
• Pilgrimage and walking: Practices involving bodily movement through space, reacquainting users with physical distance, time, and embodied effort. Studies of pilgrimage practices show significant improvements in embodied self-awareness and spiritual integration (Margry 2008; Reader 2014).
• Communal physical presence: Prioritizing face-to-face gathering over virtual meeting whenever possible, valuing the fuller communication possible through embodied co-presence. Research consistently shows that in-person religious participation provides greater social support and wellbeing benefits than online alternatives, due partly to multisensory engagement that virtual formats cannot replicate (Quadri 2020).

5.3. Sacramental Realism Versus Virtual Idealism

Christian sacramental theology resists digital idealism’s devaluation of physical materiality. Sacraments depend on specific physical elements—water, bread, wine, oil—and embodied actions. Against digital culture’s gnostic tendency to transcend ‘meat space’ for pure informational existence, sacramental theology insists that matter matters, bodies matter, and physical presence matters.

5.4. Critical Engagement Rather than Rejection

Techno-realism is not neo-Luddism. Digital technologies offer genuine benefits: rapid information access, long-distance communication, educational resources, and creative tools. The task is not wholesale rejection but discerning use—recognizing benefits while remaining vigilant about costs, cultivating practices that maximize benefits while mitigating harms.

This parallels Christianity’s historical approach to culture: selective adoption and baptism rather than complete rejection or uncritical embrace. Just as early Christians adopted Greco-Roman philosophy while rejecting elements incompatible with the Gospel, so contemporary Christians can adopt digital technologies while rejecting ideologies of disembodiment they often carry.

Religious communities successfully implementing balanced approaches emphasize intentional use—employing digital tools for specific purposes (coordinating service, sharing resources), then returning to embodied gathering (Whitehead 2024). Research on digital detox interventions shows varied outcomes; effectiveness depends on combining abstinence with positive alternatives and community support (Radtke et al. 2022; Kolhe and Naik 2025).

Practically, this means the following:

• Using technology instrumentally rather than habitually: Employing digital tools for specific purposes, then returning to embodied life, rather than defaulting to screens as a constant environment. Behavioral research confirms that intentional, purpose-driven technology use correlates with wellbeing, while habitual, default usage correlates with anxiety and dissociation (Wilcockson et al. 2019).
• Maintaining technological Sabbath: Regular breaks from digital engagement to restore balance. Jewish Sabbath-observant communities provide models: practitioners report enhanced family connection, embodied presence, and spiritual depth during screen-free periods (Shlain 2019).
• Cultivating media literacy: Understanding how media shape perception and consciously resisting manipulative design (infinite scroll, autoplay, notification systems) aimed at maximizing engagement. Media literacy education demonstrably improves critical awareness and reduces susceptibility to persuasive design techniques (Potter and Thai 2019; Pinsent 2012).
• Privileging presence: Choosing embodied gathering over virtual when feasible, recognizing that while virtual community has value, it cannot fully replace embodied communion. Theological and empirical research converges: sacramental presence requires physicality that technology cannot virtualize (Moyse 2021; Pinsent 2012).

Pinsent (2012) analyzes how digital environments reshape practical reasoning and attention in ways that undermine virtue formation. His Thomistic approach demonstrates that technologies are not merely tools we use but formative environments shaping our capacities for perception, judgment, and action. Media literacy, from this perspective, requires not only understanding persuasive techniques but cultivating attentional virtues—patience, sustained focus, resistance to distraction—that counteract digital culture’s fragmenting effects.

5.5. Educational and Pastoral Implications

Religious education and formation must address the anthropological and spiritual challenges of digital culture explicitly. This includes the following:

• Teaching theological anthropology: Articulating clearly Christianity’s understanding of humans as psychosomatic unities, contrasting this with reductive materialisms and dualisms.
• Cultivating bodily and sensory awareness: Incorporating embodied practices into formation—not only liturgical, but also movement, breathing, manual work—that develop proprioceptive and kinesthetic awareness.
• Examining technology’s effects: Encouraging reflection on how personal technology use affects prayer, relationships, bodily awareness, and spiritual receptivity.
• Modeling balanced use: Religious leaders demonstrating that Christian faithfulness in a digital age involves both engagement and restraint, both adoption and discipline.

5.6. Research Directions

A techno-realist approach acknowledges both risks and genuine benefits of digital technologies for religious practice. During COVID-19, online platforms enabled isolated individuals—elderly, disabled, geographically distant—to maintain religious community participation when physical gathering was impossible (Law 2020; Bramadat 2020). Religious organizations provided crucial social support—food pantries, financial assistance, emotional care—coordinated through digital platforms (Baker et al. 2020).

Digital tools can support rather than replace embodied practice when designed appropriately. Meditation apps with biofeedback can help users develop kinesthetic awareness of breathing and bodily states (Hao et al. 2017). Online study groups supplement in-person worship rather than substituting for it. Hybrid formats—brief online teaching followed by individual offline prayer—combine technological convenience with embodied practice (Lipková and Jarolímková 2023).

The key distinction lies in using technology instrumentally versus habitually. Accessing sacred texts online, coordinating service projects, maintaining connection during illness or travel—these represent beneficial uses that support embodied community. The concern arises when digital engagement becomes the primary mode of religious practice, progressively displacing physical gathering, multisensory participation, and embodied service.

Further research is needed on several fronts, building on significant work already underway:

• Empirical studies: Investigating correlations between digital engagement levels and capacities for contemplative prayer, liturgical participation, and embodied service. Recent work has begun addressing these questions: Luhrmann’s (2020) ethnographic research demonstrates how embodied practices (kneeling, raising hands) shape religious experience and divine perception. Quadri (2020) quantifies the differences between in-person and virtual religious participation’s effects on wellbeing. This research should be extended to examine specifically how prolonged digital immersion affects the sensory capacities—proprioception, kinesthesia, tactile awareness—that traditional spiritual practices presume.
• Developmental research: Examining how childhood digital immersion affects sensory development, embodied self-awareness, and spiritual formation. Preliminary studies raise concerns about screen time’s impact on children’s proprioceptive development and body schema formation (Heffler et al. 2024), but longitudinal research tracking spiritual formation trajectories is needed. Moyse’s (2021) theological work on childhood embodiment and spirituality provides conceptual frameworks that could inform empirical investigation.
• Theological anthropology and technology: Developing more robust theological frameworks for engaging technology that draw on multiple traditions—Orthodox emphasis on bodily participation, Catholic sacramental theology, Protestant attention to formation. Pinsent’s (2012) work on anthropology and digital culture, grounded in Thomistic virtue theory, offers promising directions. His analysis of how digital environments shape attention, practical reasoning, and moral formation complements McLuhan’s media theory with rigorous philosophical anthropology. Moyse’s (2021) integration of embodiment theology with childhood formation and Pinsent’s virtue-based approach to technology should be extended to specifically address the sensory reconfiguration and decorporation phenomena identified here.

6. Discussion

This analysis reveals that Internet technologies pose challenges to Christian anthropology more fundamental than typically acknowledged. While much religious discourse about technology focuses on content issues—pornography, misinformation, cyberbullying—these concerns, though important, may distract from the medium’s own formative power. The sensory reconfiguration and decorporation induced by prolonged screen engagement shape users profoundly, regardless of whether the content consumed is morally uplifting or degrading.

The implications extend across multiple dimensions of Christian life:

• Liturgical: If worshippers’ sensory capacities have been narrowed to vision and hearing while tactile, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory senses atrophy, liturgical practices engaging these marginalized senses (incense, genuflection, Eucharistic taste, anointing, blessing) lose effectiveness. Online worship, while valuable for those unable to physically gather, risks normalizing disembodied participation incompatible with Christian sacramentalism. As Campbell and O’Leary (2020) note, the rapid virtualization of religious practice during the pandemic has accelerated the need for a “digital ecclesiology” that critically examines how embodiment, presence, and sacramentality are transformed in online contexts.
• Formational: Christian formation traditionally involves embodied practices—fasting, pilgrimage, manual work, care for the sick—that cultivate virtue through bodily engagement. If technology habituates users to experiencing themselves as minds contingently connected to bodies, formation practices depending on psychosomatic unity lose traction.
• Missional: If the Church’s mission includes witnessing to the goodness of embodied existence and the hope of bodily resurrection, accommodating rather than challenging culture’s drift toward digital disembodiment undermines that witness. The Church must articulate and model an alternative anthropology.
• Ethical: Technologies promoting decorporation and valorizing informational personhood may desensitize users to bodily suffering—both their own and others’. If bodies seem merely provisional hardware for essentially computational selves, then bodily needs, vulnerabilities, and sufferings lose moral urgency. Christian ethics’ embodied focus—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the sick—depends on recognizing bodily existence’s irreducible significance.

The transhumanist ideologies examined here—mind-uploading, digital immortality, escape from “meat space”—might seem marginal. Yet they articulate explicitly what digital culture increasingly assumes implicitly: that authentic existence is informational/mental rather than embodied/material, that consciousness matters while bodies are contingent, that virtual experience is superior to physical. These assumptions permeate not only Silicon Valley but increasingly shape broader culture, including religious communities’ uncritical adoption of digital platforms and practices.

A techno-realist Christian response must therefore operate at multiple levels. Individually, it requires cultivating ascetical practices, preserving sensory balance, and embodied awareness despite technological pressures. Communally, it requires prioritizing physical gathering and embodied practice, resisting pressure to virtualize community and worship. Institutionally, it requires religious leaders to critically evaluate digital platforms and practices rather than adopting them unreflectively. Theologically, it requires articulating robust doctrines of creation, incarnation, and resurrection that ground Christianity’s distinctive affirmation of embodied existence.

Qualitative research during COVID-19 revealed that believers emphasized technology’s limitations for spiritual practice, noting that embodied elements—coffee fellowship, physical co-presence—were irreplaceable despite technological adaptations (Lipková and Jarolímková 2023). Quantitative studies found online religious participation during lockdown provided fewer wellbeing benefits than in-person attendance, partly because online formats cannot replicate tactile and spatial dimensions of sacred experience (Shiba et al. 2022).

Limitations of this study must be acknowledged. The analysis relies primarily on theoretical frameworks (McLuhan’s media theory, theological anthropology) rather than empirical research. While phenomenological observations about decorporation and sensory reconfiguration are drawn from common experience and scholarly analysis, quantitative studies would strengthen claims about these phenomena’s prevalence and intensity. Additionally, the study focuses primarily on negative effects—sensory disruption, decorporation, dualistic ideologies—without fully exploring ways digital technologies might be deployed that support rather than undermine psychosomatic unity and embodied spirituality. Future research should investigate both empirical dimensions and constructive possibilities more thoroughly.

Recent theological scholarship provides resources for this task. Pinsent (2012) argues that digital technologies require specifically Christian responses grounded in theological anthropology rather than generic ethical principles. Moyse (2021) demonstrates that embodiment is not a peripheral concern but central to understanding personhood and spiritual development. These scholars’ work supports and extends our analysis, confirming that sensory reconfiguration and decorporation represent fundamental theological challenges requiring substantive responses.

7. Conclusions

This article has examined how Internet technologies reconfigure human sensory experience and induce decorporation—the experiential dissociation of consciousness from the physical body. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, the Techno-Realist Manifesto, and classical doctrines of sensory unity (sensus communis), the analysis demonstrates that digital immersion amplifies certain senses (vision, hearing) while anesthetizing others (touch, kinesthesia, proprioception), disrupting the sensory balance essential to integrated human perception and experience.

This sensory reconfiguration produces the phenomenon of decorporation: prolonged screen engagement habituates users to experiencing themselves as minds contingently connected to bodies rather than as psychosomatic unities. Virtual mobility combined with physical immobility creates the experiential sense that consciousness has transcended bodily limitations, that the body is “cumbersome and useless” baggage hindering the mind’s free movement through cyberspace. This phenomenology finds ideological support in transhumanist philosophies reconceptualizing personhood in informational rather than embodied terms, valorizing the possibility of uploading consciousness to computational substrates and escaping physical embodiment entirely.

From the perspective of Christian theological anthropology, these developments pose serious challenges. Christianity’s doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, and Resurrection affirm the goodness and necessity of embodied existence. Humans are not souls imprisoned in bodies but psychosomatic unities in which body and spirit interpenetrate. Salvation involves the whole person, and Christian hope centers on bodily resurrection rather than escape from embodiment. Technologies and ideologies promoting decorporation and devaluing physical existence therefore contradict core theological commitments.

The article proposes a techno-realist approach grounded in theological anthropology that navigates between technophobic rejection and technophilic embrace. This approach recognizes digital technologies’ benefits while maintaining critical awareness of their formative power and potential harms. It calls for practicing technological asceticism—disciplines preserving sensory balance and embodied awareness—and for prioritizing sacramental realism over virtual idealism, affirming that matter matters and physical presence matters in ways virtual reality cannot replicate.

For religious communities, implications are profound. Pastoral care must address not only problematic online content but also how the medium itself reshapes perception and embodiment. Formation practices must actively cultivate bodily awareness and sensory balance as counterweights to digital pressures toward decorporation. Worship should prioritize embodied gathering and multisensory engagement rather than virtualizing liturgy. Theological education must articulate clearly Christianity’s distinctive anthropology, contrasting it with reductive materialisms and dualisms pervading digital culture.

The stakes extend beyond individual wellbeing to the Church’s mission and witness. In an age drifting toward disembodied digital existence, the Church bears witness to the goodness of embodied life, the value of physical presence, and the hope of bodily resurrection. This witness requires not simply proclaiming correct doctrine but modeling embodied community and practice that demonstrate what it means to honor the psychosomatic unity of the human person created in God’s image.

Future research should pursue both empirical and constructive directions: investigating quantitatively how digital engagement correlates with spiritual capacities and embodied awareness, and developing theological frameworks for engaging technology that draw on the full breadth of Christian tradition. As digital technologies continue proliferating and intensifying, the need for critical theological reflection on their anthropological and spiritual implications only grows more urgent.

The human person, Christianity affirms, is not a ghost in a machine, not data awaiting upload, not a mind temporarily housed in flesh. The human person is an embodied soul, a psychosomatic unity whose vocation involves not transcending but transfiguring embodied existence. Any technology or ideology dismissing this truth—however alluring its promises of transcendence, immortality, or perfection—must be recognized and resisted as incompatible with the faith once delivered to the saints. In a technological age, faithful Christian witness requires recovering and reaffirming the radical claim at Christianity’s heart: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.