The Vanishing Voices in the Digital Domain

The shrinking space for the religious, scholar, working class, and marginalized in the digital world.

Introduction

The digital age has brought numerous advancements for humanity, but it has also introduced new power dynamics, realities, and challenges. One consequence is the reduced representation of religious, working class, and marginalized people in popular apps, paywalls, AI summaries, and results found in search engine algorithms. Consequently, their voices diminish in frequency and significance with each passing day.

The digital revolution is swiftly evolving from its utopian ideals of equality and the free exchange of ideas into a corporate-controlled, clinical environment where profit motives take precedence.

Many will assume that persecution or bias against religion would play a key role in the digital revolution. However, this is not the case as religion is considered irrelevant in the mission of private enterprises. It is about monopolies, ad revenue, money, power, and control, not about abstract or metaphysical concepts.

At the dawn of the digital era, free internet software and access abounded. A regular person could easily participate using Joomla or WordPress with basic knowledge of HTML and CSS. HathiTrust was established to digitize the collections of 200 major academic libraries. Google and Microsoft were in a race to digitize books from major libraries around the globe. The Internet Archive was founded to become a centralized digital library of the world’s books.

Publishers were eager to provide snippets and whole chapters of their publications in Google Books, promoting them with a buy now option for further investigation. You could also do a search within a book, and one-sentence phrases would pop up. The internet became the ultimate utopia at the researcher’s fingertips.

Things have changed a lot since the early 2000s

Ten Reasons Why the Religious, Working Class, and Marginalized are losing their voices in the Digital Domain

1. The Collective Effort to Make the Web a Democratic Voice is Dying

This shift from democratic free and equal participation is especially noticeable in the transformation of the blogsphere.

One of the first blog programs to appear was Mambo. The free software was created in the early 2000s with significant community participation. It became mired in an Open Source controversy that led to deep division and the creation of an alternative program called Joomla. Joomla became more popular than Mambo, but was quickly overtaken by WordPress, which powers many websites today (somewhere between 5 and 43% depending on who you ask).

WordPress was started by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003, so “that people of all backgrounds, interests, and abilities should be able to access Free-as-in-speech software that empowers them to express themselves on the open web and to own their content.”¹ They built it as an Open Source project. It remains in this state to this day.

Now WordPress is a commercial enterprise dressed in socialistic clothing. The program remains free, but one has to pay for third-party add-ons like Elementor, WPBakery, Divi, plug-ins and themes to make it look and work smart. It cannot operate well without these paid assets.

You can start and host on their website, wordpress.com, for free, but to make it fully functional, one has to pay.

Due to external abuses of its Open Source underpinnings by a third-party for-profit enterprise, WordPress is moving from a decentralized, community-driven project to one that is highly controlled.

2. The Effect of Copyright on Access and Speech

Large corporations are reshaping and controlling the internet through enforcement of copyright, trademarks, and intellectual property rights. This pattern is a large trend in uprooting free expression.

It is a win-lose situation for many companies. In the loss scenario, Google is embroiled in copyright issues over its digitization of libraries and use of artificial intelligence. The Internet Archive had to scale back due to litigation. HathiTrust allows a portion for public viewing, but due to copyright laws, it gives full access only to those belonging to its affiliate libraries.

On the win side, companies like Google and OpenAI are bypassing copyright works in building their artificial information architecture. This structure benefits the regular user but behind the scenes it is increasing large enterprise digital dominance and profits.

Publishers rarely provide a full chapter for Google Books anymore, and many even restrict the one-sentence snippets.

3. Artificial Intelligence Summaries

Artificial Intelligence (AI) summaries are hurting websites, including mine. When a person searches for a subject today, they usually stop at the AI summary, and 95% do not go further.

In the past Google was showing you something that someone else has written, but now it’s writing the answer itself…²

This website, charlesasullivan.com, has grown every year until this year. It was always fun to figure out and adapt to the ever-changing search engine algorithms. There are some internal issues with the blog, but for every setback, a way was found to overcome the challenges. Today, the site is seeing a 35% year-end drop in 2025 due to AI summaries, which is small compared to other blogs and small businesses. Some are seeing up to an 80% decline.³

There is nothing inherently wrong with AI summaries but for one important factor. They should cite their sources, just as a person is ethically and morally required to do.

4. Google Ranking Metrics Ignore Metaphysical, Academic, and the Marginalized Entities

Google ranks content based on its own hierarchy, which often favors large commercial entities. For example, if The New York Times links to one of your articles, your ranking will likely improve. Consequently, if you are a scholar, writer, or independent researcher addressing your niche, you must rely on endorsements from alternative sources.

Links or endorsements from Christian universities, yeshivas, or union publications do not carry the same weight in Google’s ranking system. This makes it challenging for well-written articles from religious, union, or academic perspectives to achieve high rankings. As a result, religious or academic readers may overlook your well-researched and factual article because it appears on the tenth page of a Google search.

5. The Rise and Dominance of Apps

64% of online users access and view the internet through apps like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, or the like.⁴ These apps control the information presented to the reader. If you are a small website, developing and offering an app makes no business or marketing sense. You are dependent on a larger site’s app pointing towards yours. If not, you are out of luck.

6. Religious Sites are Underrepresented in Google Search Results

At least when I was using Google Analytics over 5 years ago, they did not even have a category for religion. Google, Meta, and other advertising-revenue-driven companies believe that religious keywords and their density are not profitable. They also do not want to target users based on religious identity—this could possibly bring accusations of discrimination.

7. The Demise of the University and Local Libraries and The Rising Cost for Independent Researchers

If you walked through almost any religious section of a university library in the past, you had a plethora of information surrounding you on virtually any historical subject.

University libraries handled paywalls and subscription services and had copies of those books on shelves that any member of the public could view. They had physical copies of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca and Latina, along with many other works of Ecclesiastical and Jewish literature, as well as the requisite dictionaries and commentaries. Even my local library carried an ancient Greek dictionary or two.

They also have access to journals from publishers such as Brill and JSTOR, as well as extensive databases such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a digital version of Migne Patrologia Latina, and the Loeb Classical Library, to name a few.

In the past, one could walk down the aisles of a bookstore like Barnes and Noble, Chapters, and browse the latest edition of Christianity Today, or if you frequented a religious bookstore, the latest Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament, or Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. Today, these free opportunities to peruse are gone.

Unfortunately, due to the reduction in religious studies at most universities since the 1990s, purchases and updates of current books, in both physical and ebook formats, are less frequent. You can find good resources up to this period, but good luck afterwards. The majority of brick-and-mortar Christian bookstores have shut down, and public libraries, because of the exorbitant cost of ebooks, hardly ever carry new academic titles.

For more information on the high cost of ebooks for university libraries, see the lecture by Jeffrey Edmunds. The Problem with E-Books: Why is Knowledge so Expensive?

The cost has shifted from the institution to the independent researcher, and it is almost impossible for the researcher to afford the same level of access. If you are an independent scholar not affiliated with a university, a Brill publication, which is well regarded for contemporary Christian academic studies, will cost between $200 and $400 per book. Careful research requires evaluating many books, so this cost alone is exponential. Brill publishes the Pentecostal academic journal Pneuma, which aligns with my studies. A yearly subscription to that journal costs $145.00. If I only want to read a review of my book in their journal, it will cost me $40.00. And when it comes to accessing the online ProQuest Migne Patrologia Latina database as an individual, ProQuest will only grant access through a higher institution of learning. Academia.edu is another site where you can find academic works for $159.00 per year. ResearchGate is free and operates in a healthy way for the distribution of knowledge. However, access is limited to those with academic affiliations, so it’s not accessible to most people, and its many pop-up advertisements are a turn-off. One can often circumvent these walls by contacting the author(s), who may send you a draft of a chapter or their whole thesis. This way, it avoids publisher copyright rules.

An alternative is to use the Logos Research system. It offers a whole suite of books, study materials, and a learning system. Not all of them are academic or modern titles. Still, the starting price is $19.99 per month, plus a high cost to access specific libraries.

Academic ebooks in general are expensive. For example, the much-awaited and coveted book, T&T Clark Handbook of Hellenistic Jewish Literature in Greek, is going for $133.00. High prices often dominate, but not always. The ancient Greek enthusiast Rick Brannon offers his translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s The Preparation for the Gospel (Praeparatio Evangelica) for $6.99 as an ebook. There are other exceptions out there, too, but you have to look really hard to find them.

8. Paywalls, Subscription Fees, and Open Source

Universities and established publishers are aware that these paywalls and high costs of ebooks are a problem, and they are working on solutions. Publishers like Brill give steep institutional discounts to students. Another solution is to shift the cost to the authors for typesetting, design, and editing, and subsequently offer the results as Open Source. Open Source in the academic world means making all scientific and research results available to everyone at no cost. This is a rough definition that has no universal standards.

Brill and Jstor are providing many books, journals, and articles this way. A current Open Source model requires the writer to pay a fee of up to $11k for publication, which is expensive, and allows commercial publishers to reuse parts of the results without paying the author. A fear exists where commercial interests can take over Open Source where the emphasis is on ad revenue generation, and is more important than data integrity.

There is also a problem of verifying a citation in paywalled instances. Suppose a reader wants to verify information from the original source. In that case, they are forced to find, purchase, and pay for the product. Most users will not do this. I consider articles behind a paywall to be dead material. Quotations from paywalled sources in my works are deliberately avoided, and references to freely available original source materials are provided as an alternative.

The digital age has yet to find a solution for affordability, access, and integrity of scholarly data.

9. The Loss of Net Neutrality Hurts Religious, Academic, Working Class, and Marginalized Viewpoints

Net neutrality means that data communications, regardless of their origin, are treated the same. Large internet corporations already segment data for extra charges by discriminating between audio (phone calls) and text, so net neutrality already is under suspicion. Major internet companies would like to prioritize services like Netflix to ensure speed and a good user experience. Of course, a large entertainment company would pay extra for this service. The speed bump that a bigger payer would want means the minor player would get less speed. Lower speed is a devastating thought for any website, as speed determines whether users come, stay or leave. The faster the site, the more users; the slower the site, the less activity. Giving speed allowances to one at the cost of another creates an unfair disadvantage against the philosopher, religious, working class, and people experiencing poverty.

On the other hand, larger religious organizations and movements such as Joel Osteen, T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, Paula White-Cain, and the like, regardless of their positions on net neutrality, have the power and money to pay for a fast-lane internet. It is not an issue for the big players.

There is also the problem of internet throttling, which causes the not-so-wealthy to have inferior access. There aren’t enough IP addresses on the internet, so some internet providers are aggregating their customers’ traffic through a single IP address to solve the problem. This occurs more often in regions with socioeconomic issues. Global IPs are configured to automatically tag such aggregations as security threats and usually slow down connections from these IP addresses. Cloudflare, one of the leading Content Delivery Network providers, claims “this “throttling creates “socioeconomic bias,” disproportionately impacting lower-income users who rely on affordable, shared connections in developing markets or rural areas.”⁵

The UN Secretary-General echoed this same concern and offers the following as an ideal social contract between society and technology:

Discussions surrounding digital technology and society are still too siloed, he added, and should be widened to include more disciplines: “When you discuss data and artificial intelligence, you might want to invite philosophers to consider ethics. You might want to bring in anthropologists and other specialists who are not typically included in technology gatherings. When you discuss social media, you need to include political and social scientists.⁶

4.8 Media development is becoming more expensive and Technical

Webhosting services and web development software remain inexpensive. However, web development is becoming more technical. There are no longer out-of-the-box solutions that can work with little effort. It takes time and energy, and web publishing is losing its premier status. It is now part of a multimedia strategy that aligns with other communication streams, such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Reels, TikTok, podcasts, and more. You need to purchase and master video and audio equipment, and possess good capture and editing software.

Multimedia software and technology software costs have climbed dramatically in the last two years, well beyond inflation.

Many small businesses, academics, religious or philosophical pundits, the marginalized or the economically disadvantaged do not have the expertise to meet these requirements. Neither do they have the finances to hire one or more specialists to achieve their goals.

Conclusion

One can add more to the list. Regardless, the overall portrait is that the collective democratic internet is dying and having an online presence is becoming increasingly technical, complex, and expensive. AI summaries are hurting smaller sites, and Google is becoming more profit-oriented in its search queries. Independent academic writers, especially those writing on religious topics, cannot afford paywalls and subscription fees.

The old 2000-year saying, “the truth shall set you free,” is now evolving to, “the truth shall set you free if you can afford to find it behind a subscription or paywall, or an endless Google search.” In the matter of religious truths, and more specifically the Christian Bible, you can find allegories, rhetoric, old books, or spin for free on social media. Nevertheless, unless you go to the tenth page of Google Search or find some esoteric website, you are going to pay for access to anything of substance.

The growing lack of affordability, the increasing complexity of the web, the prevalence of apps, and the existence of walled internet gardens and paywalls demonstrate that the average person is becoming less participatory and is viewed as a commodity to extract from. This monopolization by large enterprises means individuals have limited influence and reach.

What can we do? It is sad to see the current path of the tech utopia that had potential but ultimately never came to fruition. The lack of Government intervention certainly is a key feature in the uncontrolled digital society and there is a great need for regulation. If not, we may be moving backwards into a system similar to that of medieval feudalism. A time where a handful of lords controlled everything in their granted lands, which included human capital. They were not answerable to anyone except those higher up the chain. Historical references such as the Reformation and the French Revolution are examples that show hope and warnings about the new world we live in. I will leave those comparisons for another upcoming article.

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See also the following: When the Database Becomes god

1. Democratize Publishing, Revisited as found on November 20, 2025
2. How Google Tells You What You Want to Hear. Accessed November 20, 2025
3. AI Summaries Causing Devastating Drop in the Online News Audiences Study Finds See also Columbia Journal Review’s Traffic Apocalypse accessed November 20, 2025
4. Top Website Statistics for 2025 accessed November 20th, 2025
5. https://www.webpronews.com/cloudflare-uncovers-cgnat-bias-shared-ips-punish-innocent-users/ as found on November 30, 2025
6. https://www.un.org/en/desa/ as found on November 29, 2025. A speech made in 2018 at the “Internet Governance Forum (IGF), hosted in Paris by the UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).”