Monasteries sometimes send notices saying they are praying for me on a particular day. The names for whom they pray are in a book or rolodex, and as the wheel of time turns, so does the rota. Names are plugged automatically into the blank spaces. It's a natural for computerization. That monastery, executing its structured top-down program for ritualized prayer, is a symbol manipulating machine.
All human beings are symbol manipulating machines, and so are computers.
We're interlocked in a symbiotic embrace that is taking both networked computers and networked human beings up a spiral of mutual transformation. As we are changed by this process, the symbols we use to express our understanding of the process also change. In an oral community, prayer and ritual were alive as the words were uttered. When the words were written down, they seemed a pale reflection of words that had potency when spoken. Same thing when the printing press with movable type was invented.