fishers, surfers and casters

I downloaded and installed skype on my machine today. I hope it will help me interviewing those I can’t get to in person.

My username is paulteusner if you have skype and would like to give me a call.

Get skype here.

Last month I was in Brisbane for the Association of Internet Researchers annual conference. they were kind enough to allow me forty minutes to present my fledgling research. It went down like a treat. I think I did a good presentation, but more than that, I’ve found more and more that people love the opportunity to talk about religion, regardless of their own religious involvement. Many people approached me over the four days to compliment me on what I’m doing and begin a conversation about religion on the Internet, religion outside institutions, and how the “emerging church” sounds like something they would get involved in if they were to get religious.

The session chairs also offered a lot of useful feedback about the directions in my research. The most important piece of criticism has been the language that I’ve used of late. I talk a lot about how blogging technology impacts on individual and communal religious identity. The word, impacts, shows a slight of technological determinism, which I need to be careful of. Much more useful to talk of what blogging technology contributes to religious discourse or community.
I found a heap fo other people whose research are really fascinating. Christy Dena is doing a narratological study of cross-media entertainment – showing that not only media content is formed by narrative, but the relationships by which TV, Internet, email and mobile phone platforms carry a story can also be expressed in narrative form, as they reflect daily patterns of usage of these platforms. Aleks Krotoski is endeavouring to map relationships on Second Life, which is a huge task, and taking a psychological look at the relationship between communication process and group formations.

Outside the conference, I got the chance to meet up with Duncan Macleod, a popular emergent blogger. While I hadn’t received HREC approval to do a formal interview, it was great to simply chat about what we know and what we’re yet to discover about emerging church blogging, and to hear how his blogaholism and his involvement in house churches.

I also cought up with an old mate from Melbourne, Tim Hodgson, who’s now a deacon working for an inner city mission with the homeless in Bribane’s CBD. I told him to never come back down to Victoria. We’ll arrest him and take him under disciplinary action: nobody from our crowd should ever get a cool job in the inner city while living in a house on the Gold Coast. Living on the Gold Coast is illegal in Victoria. It’s just not right.

Technorati tag: aoir2006

My brother-in-law has loaded his music onto a myspace.com site. Well, technically he’s my step-brother-in-law, since his mum married my father-in-law, but he and my partner never lived together as step-siblings, so it’s not culturally correct. At the wedding he approached me and told me we were related, so I gave the obligatory “Don’t steal my shit” lecture all big brothers must give, which gave me the appropriate status of brother-in-law.

So, anyway, this guy I know, Joel Muston, has put some of his music onhis myspace.com page. Now, I’m not a big fan of easy listening normally, but I like these tracks. One of them, Move With It, would have to be my fave track at the moment. I suggest you check him out, and then tell him your his new fan. Could be Melbourne’s counterpart to Gnarls Barkley…

http://www.myspace.com/joelmuston

I have presented to RMIT that I will track discussions (post + 28 days of comments) in 30 blogs over three sampling periods, each of four months duration. I’m in the dead centre of the first sampling period. In order to load the discussions onto NVivo, it helps to cut and paste text from the web page to an MS Word document. In just two months of discussion, I already have over 1800 pages of text. Some may say that’d be enough for a project of the size I’ve proposed.

I may have to reconsider, yet there is so much great stuff being talked about and shared among bloggers and their audience. I’d rather shorten the number of sampling periods, or the periods’ lengths, than the number of blogs in the sample. Any advice from anyone?