fishers, surfers and casters

A couple of thoughts that have arisen after the last meeting with my supervisor, regarding blogging and religious community:

A number of blogs I’m watching closely have a set audience who post comments to the blogs regularly. Some comment on every post by the blog author. A blog community could be defined by the relationships between a blogger and his/her audience, as well as the relationships between members of the audience as they respond to each other’s comments. To what extent are these communities accidental (a group of people looking for something that just happen to find each other) or intentional (a group of people fully aware of their reason for being together)?

Why bother with the question?

It’s a matter of the quality of relationships, I think. The extent to which a blogger is fully aware of his/her audience (being made aware by the regular conversations that ensue through the comment threads) impacts on the conversations that blogger leads and moderates. As the social capital builds in each blog page, the blogger becomes more aware of the community that is being built. The accidental community that the blogger has found among his/her audience becomes more intentional.

How long will it take for a blog site to turn from a group of comments from random passers-by, to a group of people who know who they are talking to and what they’ll expect from each other? And how powerful is the blogger to make that transition happen?

We are all surfers, or swimmers, on this great lake called the WWW. Are bloggers fishing us out and drawing us into intentional community? Is that the bloggers’ purpose? Or is it the other way round, the blogger being the lost swimmer looking for someone out there to be his/her companion?

How is this different from local church communities? Australian religious history tells me that it is the institutional church that steps into a community, builds a church and calls people into it, like a fisher into a pond. However the rise of the “emerging church” would suggest the other way, a group of people wanting something different that what the institutional church has offered, and managing to find others wanting the same difference, like lost swimmers finding each other.

I received an email from an overseas mate who asked me why he hasn’t seen any new posts on this site for a while. I must say it’s nice to be missed. I’m in the midst of a sampling period, and I’ve been up most nights transferring information from blogs onto the NVivo program. It takes a lot of time; I’ve transferred over 120,000 words from one blog alone, and I’m only half-way through it. On top of that, we’ve lost some staff at work and I’m filling in some jobs which means more time at work and feeling too exhausted to think.

I presented the framework paper to my supervisor last week who thought it was a good start. It’s thrown a bog question to the research, about religious community. Our religious tratditions have developed theologies, regulations, agendas and rituals around memberships of individuals into religious communities, and of communities into wider networks and communions. The modern era has favoured the formalisation of membership and identity, and print communication facilitated and shaped this. Onlien communication and cyber-culture places new challenges to older notions of being in community with others, and of what consitutues a “religious” communal identity. This is the focus of my next paper, which I hope to have ready and online in two to three weeks.