Confessing digital sins at ASU's Emerge 2014

Do you sleep with your smartphone under your pillow? Play Candy Crush during class? Fail to return text messages from your family and friends? If you have digital sins to confess, the Ministers of the Digital Tabernacle will give you penance by locking away your device and forcing you to live without it for a few minutes.

The Digital Tabernacle was one of the featured performances at Arizona State University’s Emerge: The Carnival of the Future, which took place in Downtown Phoenix on March 7. Ron Broglio, an associate professor in ASU’s Department of English, and Marcel O’Gorman, an associate professor of English language and literature at the University of Waterloo, used the performance as a way to shed light on our digital addictions and offer “a space for contemplation in a world of online distraction, neuromarketing and psychotechnology.”

“The project asks us to create new rituals that will save us from the tarnation of digital (de)vices,” writes O’Gorman, in a Future Tense article for Slate.

To learn more about the performance and view a full photo stream of the event taken on Broglio and O’Gorman’s lifelogging cameras, read the full article at Future Tense. To learn more about Emerge, visit emerge.asu.edu.

Future Tense is a collaboration among ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine that explores how emerging technologies affect policy and society.