The first day of the conference I got to see some pretty cool presentations. Jenna Tiitsman, of the Auburn Media Group in New York, showed a review of media reports in the USA on the use of new media in the global south, and uses Myanmar as an example. In these media reports, citizen journalism provides media organisations with information about events in the country when the said organisations cannot enter. However, the journalists themselves are not praised, but the technologies they use. Western media uplifts the technology “given” to the east/south, as a tool for democracy and freedom of speech (Western values). Jenna claims that in an era of post- or neo-colonisation, our media do their best to still lay claim that the prosperity and happiness of the two-thirds world still lies in our hands.

I was alerted to this interesting graph on the World Values Survey site at the conference today. Interesting how we always find Oz, NZ and Canada together, and that Oz always appears a little more on the traditional side. Thanks, Johnny.

I’ve finally finished writing the paper I am presenting at a plenary session at the Conference on Media, Religion and Culture in Sao Paulo. If you’re interested you can read it here. This is a summary:

This paper explores the changing nature of Christian denominational discourse in an Australian context as informed by Internet technologies. It will takes as its case study three Internet sites developed and published for the promotion of three separate Christian youth festivals held in Australia between July 2008 and January 2009, undertaking a discursive analysis of their structures, content and design to examine how Internet and institutional religion interact in delivering a Christian message to Australian young people. The analysis will show that, despite the diverse theological positions, convention goals and approaches to the Internet, all three sites are surprisingly similar in form, while the content stays true to denominational tradition.

The study raises questions about the intersection of technology, culture and religion, that I intend to posit in the presentation. In particular, I would like to raise how the contours of Christian diversity in Australia are being redrawn, so that membership to a particular denomination, institution or group can no longer define what kind of Christian any Australian is.

One down, so many more tasks to go. A couple of Fridays ago I presented to the Graduate Research Panel at school. The previous semester I didn’t do as well as I had done in my first year, so I was really scared that I wouldn’t improve as much. Turns out I did really well; the panel noted that the issues they had with my last presentation had been addressed and resolved in the work I had done since.

I did confess to them that most of my achievements had happened in the few days before the panel presentation. One particular area of inquiry that had been discussed and queried last year was about the use of graphic images in blog posts and home pages. I had done some readings on the text-image relations but hadn’t found much that was useful. I was feeling a little apprehensive that questions would arise this time round and I would be terribly unprepared, and I carried that worry to bed with me. During the night I had a dream that I was trying to write my thesis but I was disturbed by a stream of poultry that kept jumping out the computer screen. The chickens, geese and turkeys woke me up at about 2am.

I arose, opened my computer and searched the hard drive for “joyous Christian chick”. A saved copy of the home page of Jen’s musings opened up. I wondered, “joyous” is such a Christian word: it’s found in hymns and prayers and spoken often in churches, yet it isn’t heard much outside those buildings. On the other hand, “chick” is such a street word, so rarely heard in church. Jen’s site is very pink, there are pictures of her scattered around the place, enjoying clear drinks, wedding white dresses, etc. It’s a girlie site. And she appears he feminist in her blog, posting on women’s issues and projects, both locally and around the world.

What Jen’s musings does so well is an interplay between fields of textual discourse: church vs street and girlishness vs feminism. I have found variations of this intertextual play particularly in the arrangement of graphic imagery and text in nearly all blogs. I have found opposites being played with often, including centre/margins, work/pleasure, inside/outside, freedom/imprisonment, dirt/art, youth/age, tradition/heresy, intimacy/distance, even sacrament/profanity.

And I can’t say that they are just play, with text, meanings, attitudes. They all seem to be part of a large, quite conscientious, campaign to shift modes of meaning in religious discourse.

Here are some more examples, taken from Livingroom and Lionfish. throughout the course of my study I will be spending a lot of time looking at the types of meanings that are intended to be generated for audiences, and how they involve some sort of “play”, albeit part of some conscientious project, with different forms of discursive practice, all within a larger discursive realm (being the blogosphere of course).