I got memed by a brand new friend on the theme of memes. Lynette requests: name five reasons why you do (not) respond to memes.

Here are my five reasons:

1. I don’t get asked much, so why the hell not?
2. I get kinda flattered that someone out of the ether (e.g. Lynette) tags me.
3. It makes me think about things I haven’t thought of in a while.
4. It’s a good procrastination tool from all the things I should rather be doing at this computer.
5. If I ever had the time and the inclination, it’d be good to follow a meme and see where it spreads.

Now, there are many that I would like to tag, however I’m in the middle of a sample period and don’t want to see my name on any of these blogs I’m following. So here a just two that I can and would like to tag on this:

1. Stephen, 2. Arthur, and 3. Mary-Helen, would you oblige me this little indulgence?

The picture, in order to exist online we must write ourselves into being, was orginally uploaded to Flickr by lynetter.

Some days I get excited about what I’ll be learning and producing in this degree. This excitement sometimes leads to trouble, especially to us ENFP types who love to make goals but get annoyed at doing all the tedious work required. In this instance, it leads to borrowoing a stack of books, but never getting around to making time to think about whether or not to make a time to read them. I borrow from two libraries, and depend on their warning emails (WARNING: Book such and such is due sometime next week) to remind me to log on to renew my loan. In one library, I’ve renewed books a total of 11 times, so they’ve been sitting on my desk unopened for almost a year now. The other library neglected to send me a wraning email in January, so at the start of february I have eleven books overdue. One bugger about it was I had to trudge a suitcase of books from Shepparton to Melbourne; the other bugger was that I knew a fine was due.

So I carried a little trepidation when I went to borrow a book from that library today. As I presented the book to the loans desk I showed my credit card and said that I bet I had a whopping fine. The reply was a relief: “We forgot to send warning emails last month so we knew that there’d be a lot of books returned overdue, so we went through the computer and deleted all the fines given to people”. Aaahhh.

The upshot of this is that I have a copy of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace which I hope is the last book I need to peruse before I start working on thinking about starting to consider beginning to write a draft of the first section of the first part of my first draft of my first chapter. It’ll be here soon, maybe, like, whatever.

I’m also trying to get hold of the Human Research Ethics Committee about how this blog is helping me do my research. All of you out there ahve made some really helpful, insightful and thought-provoking comments to some of my posts. I can’t thank you enough for it. But if I want to use some of this as data I think I need some sort of disclaimer on my blog or on the comments section, and I need advice on this. I’m proposing a couple of things, which you’ll expect soon:

• You may get an email with a copy of an old comment with a request to include it in my sample.
• You may see a disclaimer when you clik on the “Comments” button that will warn you that your comments may be used for my research.

But I know most people assume that this whole site is a public document, and I know all of you are very nice people. So it’s just the redtapers I have to appease here, as well as my need to make sure I treat people right.

It seems people are reading my blog from every continent. I’m impressed.

I’d love for some people who aren’t regular commenters to send a comment to me, saying hi and where you’re from (especially if you’re from Africa, South America or Asia!), and tell me a bit about how you got here, why you’ve come and what you’d like to read about. It’d help me get a better picture of whom I’m blogging to and what I should blog more about.

To all of you out there, thanks for reading my blog, and I hope to read your comments soon.

I’ve been invited to do a guest lecture on the Internet, titled Digital Convergences at my university - something pretty low key around the development of the Internet and its contributions to societal change. There will be a fair bit of it devoted to religion online and impacts on offline values and practices.

I’m meant to gasbag for about an hour, and then present a video of some sort that present the theme of my arguments and topics. Does anyone know of any clip from a movie, a documentary or YouTibe clip that I could use? I could really do with some suggestions.