I’m Paul.
I’ve just submitted a PhD thesis to the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne that examines how people to use blogging technology to construct religious identities. I’m keen to conduct further research into how religion, culture and new media intersect in the everyday lives of people, particularly digital natives. Click to find out more about my teaching and research interests, and my curriculum vitae.
I’m aiming that this blog will be a collection of thoughts, discussions and links around research interests listed in them. I want to focus this blog around the following themes:
Glocal identities: This theme includes how people are using new media to find identity and belonging in cultures that span distances, with respect to the maintenance/shaping of global diasporas and the impact of new media on how people think of culture, race and nationality. Of real interest is the changing place and face of religion and how it relates to this. #glocalid
Cyborg culture: Gotta love that word, Cyborg. Just as postmodernism grew from literary and philosophical obscurity in the 1950s to pervade popular culture in the West, so posthumanism is named, embodied, symbolised, debated, embraced, rejected. Still working on an operational definition of the term, but I think if the modern ideas of meta-narrative and flaneur are challenged in postmodenism, then posthumanism calls to rethink preconceptions that "what it means to be human": (a) exist in all humans, (b) exist only in humans, and (c) is does not change. It seems that more and more this conversation is being introduced into book and cinema (Kindle and iPad) audiences. I’m keen to find a context for exploring posthumanism in the culture of digital natives, exploring how they retrieve/store/process information, make social relations, and participate as local and global citizens, through the integration of technology into their everyday lives, bodies and self-perceptions. #cycult
Loners, losers and lovers: There are many moral panics about life online. Australia is creating a generation of loners, who spend time in social media but at the expense of real connections with people and involvement in community. Lost in tweets, links and updates, young people have either squandered their ability to be truly attentive to text and the rich culture that is accessed from being present in reading literature and art, or they have never acquired it. But I, a lover of the Internet, wonder if “being connected” and “being attentive” are terms that are defined by a waning culture, in search of rediscovery. And I wonder if presence and connections, creativity and participation, are actually thriving, but in ways that challenge political and cultural perspectives of older generations. #lllosers
Public/private: It’s a big question of late to new media researchers, whether social media technologies and applications blur the divide between spheres of public and private discourse. I wonder if it’s that simple – are there only two spheres? I’d like to test the idea that new media have either made another sphere, or made more apparent a phenomenon that has been around for a while. I’d like to explore the notion of "networked publics". I’d like to see if it’s a useful term for thinking how people present themselves, talk about others, and explore boundaries of privacy in online spaces. #privpub
Religious prosumption: This was a big interest while doing the PhD, and I’d like to pursue it further. The promise found in "Web 2.0" rhetoric is in the reshaping of relationships between producers and consumers of media texts, to enhance democracy by letting more people into public discourses, and challenge patterns of authority in social institutions, like religious organisations. How rhetoric transforms into reality, with respect to the voices of women, young people, cultural and racial minorities, etc, is the focus of this theme. #relpro
Convergence: Big word. It could refer to the conditions which allow for a machine to penetrate a society, like how the printing press didn’t work in China because they didn’t have right paper for it. Or it could refer to how texts and narratives are shared and progressed over multiple media platforms, like how the Matrix story moved from the cinema to DVD to console gaming and back to Matrix Reloaded. I’m interested in both, but I’m more interested in the former. In any case, both uses of the term challenge the usefulness of technological determinism as a way of looking at people’s relationship with technology, and encourage thinking about the social values that shape technology. #converge
