This photo doesn’t do justice to the sunset I saw an hour ago over the neighbour’s fence in the backyard. Bright white rays of sun signalled the end of yet another year, with promise and invitation for what comes tomorrow and thereafter.

Happy New Year everyone.

I’ve just emailed an article for Zadok to consider publishing in their next edition, which will focus on technology in everyday life. The title of the article is Religion 2.0: Heralding a new wave in online religion. Not an academic paper, so no references and more general ranting than focusing on a point. It’s a whole of lot random thoughts with relatively little substance, as I’m yet to do a lot of analysis and interviews, but the general questions is explored: As the Internet moves from Oldweb to Web 2.0, will Chrsitianity also move to a more user-friendly religion? It’s here if you want a gander.

When my partner told me she was going out to get presents for family and more clothes for herself, I spread open my legs and let her see the gaping hole in my favourite pair of denim shorts, and then pretended to whimper about the inevitable loss of my best friend (I had been wearing them every day since September). So she obliged.

I would do it myself, but I must confess, I’m a Christmas grinch. These holidays are always very hard for me, and I like to deal with it by wearing my grumpy face and hoping that Kate will cover all the festivities’ essentials, like buying food and presents and gift wrapping. After four years working with homeless and mentally ill in Melbourne’s inner city, I always found this time to be particularly rough on the lonely. My thoughts tend to go their way and stay with them. So my family is normally left with diatribes about the abuse of Santa Claus consumerism, whinges and moans about how much money we’ll have to spend on useless plastic toys that will break by the end of Christmas day, and worries about what we are actually teaching our kids.

Noble from my point of view, but I can understand why some members of the house want me .

She came back with two potential new homies. One made me look like a fat primary school kid. I decided to return it tonight, as the shops were still open and we needed the cash for the next few days.

As soon as I walked out the door the rain came. Determined and constant. Pounding and rattling as an infantry returns from battle. The sky was covered in cloud, and water was running down from every rooftop, filling the air as traffic tyres threw it back up from the road.

Reporters say that this wet will remain until Christmas Day. The best wish granted this season. It’s not enough to break the drought. But it’s enough to lift our spirits, for a time.

Tomorrow the family is driving to Mildura, which in any given year has more days of sunshine than the Gold Coast, but this time will be grey, wet, and even a little cool. But in this outback Victorian town my sister, who has returned from three years in the Northern hemisphere, will be meeting my son. I can’t wait to see the look on her face.

Wherever you are, I wish you the best of your season’s colours, whether they be white, blue, grey, yellow or green. But for all of you I wish that your spirits are lifted, that they evaporate and transpire and fill the air, and rain down on you and those you love.

Merry Christmas, from a grinch whose grumps have been washed away for a while.

I’ve just read an article by Helen Kennedy titled Beyond anonymity where she argues:

that online identities are often continuous with offline selves, not reconfigured versions of subjectivities in real life; for this reason it is necessary to go beyond internet identities, to look at offline contexts of online selves, in order to comprehend virtual life fully. […] If internet identity research is to reposition itself conceptually […] then it needs to engage with and learn from ongoing debates within cultural studies which call into questions the usefulness of the context of identity.

She draws on a history of research into online identities that was started by Sherry Turkle’s seminal work, Life on the Screen. For Kennedy, we have historically viewed online identity as something played out, performed, enacted as if we were actors on stage. She believes that this view falls short of the real story of people’s engagement with their online selves, and that cybercultural studies needs to acknowledge that the playing out of identity happens in the flow between our online and offline selves.

Though I found the article useful, it was kind of a “like d’uh” moment when I read this. My experience of blogging, and my reading of bloggers, tells me the formation of identity online is intrinsically linked with offline experiences. Bloggers in my sample tend not to separate their blogging journey from the rest of their lives, but endeavour to incorporate their experiences in the real world in the virtual.

It’s making me think that we should not consider blogging identities as things that are “formed”, but things that are “-formed”, i.e. we need some prefixes here. I can think of three; what do you think?

• Conforming identities: bloggers endeavour to fit into a blogging community, whether it be the EC blogosphere, the anti-Bush or the pro-working mothers blogging community. Bloggers talk of their experiences, desires and attitudes as similar to some others, and different from others still.
• Transforming identities: bloggers place themselves on the screen, and enter the virtual world, for experiences that will change them, lead them to new aspirations and desires, enlarge their small notions, meet strange new people.
• Reforming identities: bloggers meet to promote change in their offline lives.

Technorati tags: Helen Kennedy, online identity.