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Science writer Margaret Wertheim suggests in The Pearly Gates of CyberSpace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet that cyberspace has become for some a technological substitute for the heaven of Christian aspiration. “The Heavenly City of the New Jerusalem was the great promise of early Christianity,” she writes. “In the last centuries of the Roman era, as the empire disintegrated, such a vision offered special appeal.

"There is no There there,” said Gertrude Stein about Oakland, California. “There is a different there there,” say I, an Oaklandite by birth, about virtuality. “Virtual” presence differs from “real” presence in propinquity—time, place and relationship—as well as vividness and interactivity. The technology of virtual presence simulates “being there”; it holds out the promise of presence on demand—and thereby demands that we do some careful thinking about presence. Consider “virtual worship.”