Sun 10 Jun 2007
So on Friday I had my biannual presentation to the Graduate Research Conference at RMIT. I think I did okay. I presented the five theses and they appeared to appreciate them, and acknowledge that I’ve progressing along. A couple of concerns arose in my presentation that I’ve been asked to consider in greater depth.
1. Use of graphic & text. I’m finding the study of blogs unique in the tradition of researching religion online, which has always (it seems) focussed on how people use text online to communicate. Now bloggers are creating pages and posts using graphics, pictures, colour schemes, embedded sound and video (Flash, YouTube, etc). I think it’s important to acknowledge how these factors contribute to the communication of religious identity, and so a study of them should be included in the work. Yet I’ve found very little in the way of researching image and sound together with text. I guess I’m looking for a framework to do semiotic study on image and sound and its relationship with text, but I’ve found nothing so far beyond simple taxonomies of text/image placement. I’m interested but I’m afraid it will take up way too much time and effort.
2. Women EC bloggers. I’ve got a massive majority of men bloggers in my sample, with only about 10% female. I don’t think it’s an under-representation though. I think men are more attracted to blogging than women (after all, we are more narcissistic that way 
). The apparent lack of female bloggers in my sample was an issue for me up until about a year ago when I was warned off by advisors about getting too deep into feminist issues. It seems this year they’ve changed their minds. They’d like me to look at the place of women in emerging church discourse, the place of women in the blogosphere and notions of female embodiment in religion (like incarnational mission, ordination & ministry etc) as compared to disembodiment in virtual communication. I’m keen on exploring this stuff, though I imagine it will in the end be a relatively minor portion of my thesis. My only problem is that if my advisors hadn’t umm-ed and aaah-ed about it so much over the past one and a half years I could have done some good work on it already, and I’m fearing I’m off to a late start on it.
What do you guys think of this?
June 10th, 2007 at 14:02
Most of the bloggers I read are women – they may be underepresented in EC blogging but they are heavily over-represented in craft blogging and parenting blogging, for example. I’m sure there is a feminist analysis that could be done on this – I think there’s a chapter in Uses of Blogs that might help – but it’s probably a PhD on its own.
June 10th, 2007 at 14:08
Thanks for the comment, mate.
Yeah, I’m starting to think that the lack of female EC bloggers has as much to say about the state of religion in Australia as it does about blogging.
I’d blog about parenting if only to show what NOT to do. I’d title it “The daily patterns of a bear with a sore head” !!
June 10th, 2007 at 18:32
i don’t have kids and i couldn’t sew if my life depended on it!
not having done a thesis myself, only edited them for others, i wonder if that about turn by supervisors happens often – how frustrating
there could be some interesting stuff in their proposals, but i agree with mh, it could be a thesis topic all on its own
June 13th, 2007 at 10:32
Hey Paul,
Regarding Women EC bloggers: I would assume that your work could incorporate the ‘place of women in the emerging church discourse & in the blogosphere’ easily enough. However, I think being asked to explore notions of embodiment and disembodiment (as described above) is a bit of a stretch and would involve feminist perspectives and analysis. Fair enough if this was your major for the last 10 yrs…!!!…
June 13th, 2007 at 10:45
I sent out a call for help to one of the email lists that I’m on, and got a lot of good readings and opinions about this, particularly why there are quite a lot of female bloggers yet relatively few are considered “A-list” – and some reflections on what constitutes A-list and why women are excluded. I expect these readings will help me out a bit on this.