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?

Okay, I’m going to make this short and sweet, only because I’m doing way to much thinking today and I just need a brain-dump so I can clear my head for a big weekend of seminar presentations and reading.

Nationalism: Emerging church bloggers discuss online and have mentioned to me in interviews that the ec movement/conversation/what-have-you has a tangible Australian character. Some have mentioned a focus on missional theology and praxis is evident in this country, distinct from the progressive theology of the movement in the US or the alt.worship movement of the UK. I would tend to disagree with this statement only in that I see all foci present in Oz blogs. Nevertheless, despite whether or not there may be a down-under flavour emerging in the movement, by no means is there any intention to bring about a formalised organisation that would consider itself the Australian emerging church. While many point to The FORGE Network as the Australian counterparts to emergent.com in the USA, many others (including FORGE itself) considers FORGE to be simply a training network, a connection of like-minded people for the ongoing development of church leadership and mission, and consists of members/participants who both do and do not identify with terms such as EC.

Globalisation: I believe the influence of emerging church voices in other parts of the English-speaking world (particularly USA, UK, NZ, Canada) is recognised in this country, and that Australian emerging church bloggers interact with overseas bloggers as much and as readily as they do with their compatriots. Yet I believe the search for an Australian “flavour” or “unique focus” (as mentioned above) is in reaction to perceived endeavours to create a global movement or identity that may be defined by people or organisations overseas.

Being “glocal”: is the negotiation of the problem mentioned at the end of Thesis 1 - how is incarnational theology and mission to be discussed, affirmed and made central to a movement in a forum where people are disembodied? Being “glocal” means sharing one’s experiences of religion in a local context with others in a setting without borders. It is a reaction to both nationalisation and globalisation, and a rebellion against the traditional denominational structures in which the modern church operates. Being “glocal” invites people from around the world to join in a local mission, rather than forming a global organisation.

Definitely needs more work, and I’d appreciate your comments.

This thesis is not really a thesis yet, more an issue of exploration. Here I am concerned with working out how bloggers distribute authority among themselves, and to what extent are bloggers challenging sytems of authority for the wider church in their presentation of the emerging church movement/conversation/yada yada.

Heidi Campbell, in her latest work, recalls Max Weber’s thinking about three types of pure authority: legal, traditional and charismatic. Weber sees authority as that person, office or institution that we call on to legitmiate our beliefs, choices and bahaviours. Legal authority is that which legitimates or condemns our beliefs or actions by the imposition of norms and rules. Traditional authority does the same according to the practices of people since “time immemorial”. Charismatic authority informs our decisions and values according to our aspiration to a person who exhibits certain characteristics or ideals. I find this definition of authory extremely helpful as a starting point and my thanks go to Max for highlighting it, and to Heidi for locating him for me.

It is true that the blogosphere, like email groups, social networking sites and personal home pages, have become a forum for exposing, exploring, reinforcing, questioning and redefining the authority of norms, offices and regulations, traditions and figures (both past and contemporary) of Christianity and Christendom, in the apparent security of cyberspace. Yet in the blogging environment new institutions and systems have emerged that have allowed norms, traditions and figures to accumulate and enforce authority over and above previous systems in the offline world. My interest lies not just in what legal, traditional and charismatic authorities bloggers adhere to or rebel against, but how they do it; how they identify, bargain with and navigate through the mechanisms by which authority is distributed in their religious life, both offline and in the blogosphere.

The blog is the castle
The blogger is the supreme authority over his or her own web page. The blogger is free to say or not say anything, and it will be legitimated purely by the fact that it is published on his or her blog. The blogger has autocracy over the nature and content of discussion threads, as only he or she can access the delete and edit buttons on the comments of his or her audience. How one bloggers exercises this authority differs across the emerging church blogosphere, but is generally ruled by the blogger’s own personal ethics, timely choices and whims, and desires for a certain kind of relationship with the audience. So the blogger has the inherent capacity to dispute and question the laws and traditions of his or her religious community/denomination, and be free from censorship by his or her religious leaders. This is the attraction to blogging for many, I believe, and will hopefully be able to show in my greater research project.

Yet beyond the blog is the blogosphere, a network of connections between blog sites based on the phenomenon that bloggers read other blogs and let that fact be known to their own audiences. Within this network authority is formed: rules of engagement are discussed, certain behaviours are assumed or rejected, and certain members are labelled as “authoritative voices” for the emerging church blogosphere.

The search engine and the authority market
In the world of Google and Technorati, the hyperlink is the currency of authority. These search engines rate the “authority” of a blogger by counting how many hyperlinks are made to his or her pages by other blogs (and other web sites). Therefore, I have already increased the authority of Ms Campbell’s research blog already in this post. If hyperlinks are a currency, then authority is a commodity whose value is determined by a market force, and in this post I have participated in this market. The authority market has the potential to lead some bloggers to exhibit certain behaviours, for example making post headlines, Technorati tags that bloggers assume would attract a wider readership, or link-slutting, where people make friendly comments on other blogs with no perceivable intent than to place a link to their own page on that blog’s discussion thread.

Emerging church bloggers are all too aware of the Technorati ranking of authority. They acknowledge its presence and congratulate those who are high on the list. Yet they also respond to the phenomenon with ethics. They make light of, or even celebrate, when their ranking diminishes. They start and continue memes that list links to relatively unknown blogs, even specifically promoting an intentional manipluation of the Technorati system. With the unlimited currency available to them, bloggers participate in the Google/Technorati authority supermarket, but with a mischief and a rebellion informed by their religious identity.

Writers, bloggers and ploggers
While it is fair to say that authority is disrtibuted among bloggers accroding to hyperlinks, why one blogger would receive more currency than another should be asked. I haven’t worked it out yet, and I’m not sure I even will. But it appears to me that much writing by emerging church bloggers reflect on the new thoughts, opinions, discoveries and experiences of comtemporary writers on missional/postmodern/emerging theology. This may be read with a little voice inside readers’ heads saying “well, d’uh”, but I write this comment with the thought that despite the rapid rise of the Internet as a forum for debate, what makes a work of theory or opinion “authoritative” is still based on whether it can be published into a book. Most ec bloggers are avid readers, having current or past careers in tertiary institutions (both as students and teachers). The authority of intellect, as attested by having a published work, is strong among my sample.

Other authorities and rebellions
It also means that the words of contemporary writers are, generally, and I mean generally because I can’t back any of this up yet until I’ve fully analysed the posts (and that will take time - here’s nothing I’ve prepared earlier), considered more authoritative than the words of current bishops, moderators and other bearers of traditional religious offices. I believe there lies, somewhere down there in the words of the blogger, a rebellion against the official lines of church authority in favour of more independent avenues of thought and debate, such as the publishing house, and the blog.

Enough for now, but I will be back to update this post with clearer and more informed thoughts. I will want to explore more in depth about what makes a voice in the emerging church blogosphere “authoritative”, who has the power to install norms and codes of conduct in the online environment, and in what other ways besides hyperlinks is authority transacted. In the meantime, I’d appreciate your thoughts on this.

Though some of my students have said I look like Ronan Keating in the past.