In this week’s Encounter program, Worship 2.0, Masako Fukui explores how mainly Christian and Jewish faiths are using social media, and discover a future where we’re likely to merge with our mobile communications tools to become religious cyborgs. But what kind of cyborgs still remains a mystery.

The program about social media and religion will air this Saturday, 5 p.m. (AEST) on ABC Radio National or it can be streamed or downloaded.

Please feel free to leave a comment on our comments pages, or on our twitter feed.

I’d like to promote a book coming out by IGI Global, of which I’m a contributor:

Networked Sociability and Individualism: Technology for Personal and Professional Relationships, ed. Francesca Comunello.

The recent popularity of Social Network Sites (SNS) shows that there is a growing interest in articulating, making visible, and managing personal or professional relationships through technology-enabled environments.

Networked Sociability and Individualism: Technology for Personal and Professional Relationships provides a multidisciplinary framework for analysing the new forms of sociability enabled by digital media and networks. This book focuses on a variety of social media and computer-mediated communication environments with the aim of identifying and understanding different types of social behaviour and identity expression.

For more information, and a list of contributors, go to http://www.igi-global.com/book/networked-sociability-individualism/53001. To get a discount when ordering one or more copies (and other titles), go here: http://www.igi-global.com/Files/Ancillary/e854d522-d7bc-4f50-aab8-d4213da6f8fa_9781613503386.pdf.

The podcast conversation explores two topics: our relationship with robots, and our relationships with each other through machines. And she opened up her future fears.

Fear 1: that our need for connection with people will be replaced with robots. Her problem with this is that our need for connection will not fully be reciprocated, as robots may simulate a need for us, but not really have it (robots will have need for power and maintenance, but not touch, talk, etc). Remember how we feared this twenty years ago with tamagotchis? However, tamagotchis only ever entered our society as a game. While robots may give us the perception of need and communication thereof, there are definite therapeutic benefits in this.

Fear 2: that if robots need less, and do more, then they will replace humans. I agree this is a true fear, but it’s a problem that’s already happening in the world. E.g. Shifting work from Australia to India. To combat this we struggle to improve conditions for workers on a global scale, protect rights and build solid infrastructure that will fairly distribute wealth and health in the face of globalization. While globalization may shift to robotization, this problems remain and so too the fight for solution.

Fear 3: that sharing information on mobile devices gives us only illusion of togetherness, not a reality. She harks back to days where families watched TV together. Here Turkle really exposes her “Good old days” syndrome in that, back in those days, people complained that TV replaced true conversation, playing music as a family, etc. Parents lament they can only get their child to text "I love you" rather than say it. My parents complained kids didn’t talk at all. Her book’s chapter which explores this is titled "Don’t call!" The basic telephone offered the value of voice to conversation, that is now lost to us. Maybe the deeper issue is that telephone demanded time and attention, while kids may have voice but don’t have time commitment. This may be a result of poor parenting in technologised environment. My last post explored how parents are dealing with this. Also, recent news has shown that social media can be a powerful joining and mobilizing force, if used well.

Fear 4: the surge of triviality in social media replaces deep connection of full conversation. She is reiterating all of Carr’s laments here. Her experience of connecting with people she admired on Twitter only to see their banal tweets on not being able to find a good coffee at the airport. Laments the public sphere is being flooded with trivial information. In my eyes she merely shows that she is still stuck in the delineation between public and private. Social media is challenging us to reconsider the balance between public and private in our social connections, by rhizomatising them. It shows that she had an expectation of her meeting with this person through Twitter, but that may have just as well occurred if she happened upon him or her in person at the airport. Her expectations of Twitter are not mine, and so her response to it is different.

The generation gap between digital natives and digital immigrants is becoming more obvious as digital immigrants count their losses in the cultural convergence, and publish them. However I remain convinced that it is a repeat of countless shifts in cultural values and practices. Already the signs are here about emotional, physical and social well-being will be maintained, if not strengthened. Other things, we should just let go.

Remember when you were 16 years old? Now, imagine you are 16 and living in a suburb where your or your friends’ parents think earning between 60 and 90 grand a year is, politely, "living simply". Your high school no longer has funds to teach you anything beyond maths, science and the traditional humanities, so if you want to explore art, design or music then you ask your parents to pay for you to go to a summer camp. The local council doesn’t allow teenagers to hang out in public spaces, for some reason, so you meet friends at home, or get your parents to pay for you to join a tennis club.

Life seems to suck a little, but you have one thing up your sleeve, or, well, in your home. You have access to good technology. your parents know a lot about the latest computer hardware and software, even though you know more, and they can get it cheaper than most people. If your parents have a bit of money, then each family members has the tech they need, and there’s a room in your house with some top play gear. If your parents have a bit more money, then your house will be designed for great play gear to happen.

This is, according to Heather Horst, a researcher at the University of California, pretty much what it’s like for a teenager in Silicon Valley today. In a seminar presented at RMIT on 21 June, she offered us her findings on an in-depth study of families and their homes in the Californian region, where she sought out how both parents and children work out effective family life immersed in new technology. She discovered:

• large tech placed in family spaces, in order to allow parents to monitor children’s use
• new spaces created in new homes for tech: e.g. Rumpus rooms, tech rooms, etc
• others would renovate old family rooms into "media" rooms
• unlike their parents, children don’t consider bedrooms are private spaces, as parents listen in, or they share with siblings. Private spaces for kids more likely in social media sites than in physical spaces

What generated much interest at the seminar was the amount of professional work-life that parents bring back into the home. As work makes its way into family life in Silicon Valley, the boundaries between “homespace” and “workspace” are blurred. Given the amount of time that both parents and children spend on computers and devices, the opportunity to turn the desktop into a family space, like the dining table and lounge room, is optimised.

Horst makes the exciting claim that this reflects images of family life in pre-industrial Europe and its colonies, where trades, crafts and professions were conducted as much at home as in the town centre, where children were involved, and where work and parenting were done more or less simultaneously.

Of course, this pattern is just confined to the Silicon Valley. At home I have a desktop in the study, as well as a laptop. I cannot keep from bringing work home with me, and used to have the laptop in the lounge where I could work, check emails, etc. while hanging out with the kids who are playing on the PS3 and watching TV. Now my daughter is a little older, she needs my laptop to connect with friends, develop her craft on deviantart.com, do research and homework tasks. Our dining table has become a workspace for her, since I’d rather she were online when I’m around than in her bedroom. It means I prefer now not to work in my study on the desktop, but somehow get a few things done at the same table as her. I find that when I do, even though we are paying attention to our own devices, we get to talk a little more and connect than we would if I were in another room. My child’s tech use is influencing my own in the home.

When it comes to Cloud computing services, Apple is arguably a late starter. Many organisations have relied on Google services for years, while mere individuals have benefited from free services like Dropbox. Even Microsoft offered free online and sharing services for users of Microsoft 2010, which I think is a really good system, as long as you have the cash to install its expensive software on everything you use, and the local library’s or Internet cafe’s browsers are up to date (which you can never really expect). The word is though, that iCloud, together with new iOS for Apple’s mobile devices, will mean that the company will catch up pretty quickly, offering users online storage of music, documents, mobile apps, books.

Apple’s catch-up will represent a real turn in the way all operating system creators and service providers will assume its marketplace to be. Not long ago, say, early this century even, these creators (MS, Apple and the like) invested in development that allowed ordinary people like me to move their media hub from the lounge room shelf to the desktop in the study or the laptop on the coffee table. Digital natives grabbed that bull by both horns. Spaces in the home that housed CDs and DVDs became free space (or replaced by data storage drives), to the extent that listening to CDs has almost become a new definition for “old guy”.

We could expect that in the 2010s the new turn will be away from the household computer to remote storage. Could it be that soon owning a computer with a large storage space and tower in the study will be the new definition for “old guy”?

Our new reliance on access to cloud services has implications that could keep any dinner-table conversation for a little while, and there are debates in the media. One such conversation is over Apple’s “iTunes Match” service, where, for a subscription fee, a copy of any music stored on your computer that wasn’t bought from the iTunes store will be kept in your iCloud storage service, then synced to all your devices. If you’ve obtained that music illegally and it was matched by Apple, some believe this means that Apple has aided and abetted piracy. I disagree with the tone (and indeed the language) of the article that I just linked to, and I think it’s a fair enough comment that doesn’t warrant such an attack.

However the claim may perhaps contain a slight misconception of the culture of illegal media file sharing and distribution. This article, I think, paints a more accurate picture of everyday use and distribution of illegal/unlicensed material, far beyond the hype that pirates are insidious characters who are conspiring to rob people of incomes, take down companies, and launder profits from theft. In any case, music companies are starting to see more investment value in live performances and merchandising than fighting piracy.

It seems that less than eight years ago, few people would associate the term "social networking" with computers. Now everybody does. But 2010 saw a couple (among thousands) of programs that would challenge the association of the term to computer programs, and may introduce something new.

If you have iTunes version 10, you would have quite a few messages from the program asking you to join up to Ping, its embedded social networking site. When first seeing it, I wondered why Apple would want to set up another social networking program, but given the demise of Myspace, on which many emerging musicians had depended for gathering an audience, there may be a space opened up for the idea. Initially Ping was criticised for connecting people to music only available through large labels, preventing the introduction of music from the independents, but the update offered through iTunes 10.1 may have started to address this.

I was surprised when I found out about Ping. There are so many stand-alone social networking sites out there. Why would a music player application want to have one of its own? I’m reminded of Castells’ study of cable television back in the day, where he saw a multitude of channels quickly coming about, that were tailored to specific topics and genres. Castells recalled McLuhan’s adage, "The medium is the message," and thought that now the message has become the medium.

We know that Amazon wants to set up a cloud-based music player system, and hear around the traps that Apple and Google are looking in that direction too. The capacity to keep all your music in an online server can allow for a lot of sharing (once all DRM debacles are sorted) between users. A social networking system like Ping would allow for those connections to be easily created, manipulated and contained by users.

Then there’s Flipboard. Designed for the iPad interface, the program arranges posts, status updates and messages sourced from the user’s Facebook, Twitter and blog reader accounts, into blocks on a page, as if you were reading articles from a magazine. Furthermore, if one of your Facebook or Twitter friends posts a link to a web page or video on their profile page, Flipboard will present the video or a preview of the linked page.

Web browsers, when pointed at URLslike facebook.com, tend to privilege the profile, and therefore we see information arranged according to who has sent it. Flipboard, on the other hand, privileges content over the source, arranging information according to either/both the time it arrived or/and the type of content (image/words/video).

I think both Flipboard and Ping present a change in the way we se social networking. The program information that we have about our friends and our online connections with them, while presented as content in Web Browsers, is treated as metadata in these programs. Our "friendships" are to these programs as RSS is to a blog reader. As more programs emerge and their usage grows, we will see the very nature of "friend" change in the context of online social networking. I will no longer add you to Facebook because I want to be connected to you, rather because I like your network and your information.

I understand that to cite the thesis, this is the reference to use:

Emerson Teusner, P 2010, Emerging church bloggers in Australia: Prophets, priests and rulers in God’s virtual world, PhD Thesis, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University.

Lawson’s argument is far less entertaining, and arguably less eloquent. He calls the child an “asshole”, an example of a country that is going dumb, a “jerk”. In the comment thread that follows, one reader wonders if a “retroactive abortion” is warranted.

In the fledgling digital age, there are some of us that lament the demise of a literate population, the slow death of a rich culture of words and their publishing. Every effort is made by them to remind us that worlds of imagination, which can only exist in the minds of readers, are sacred and must be preserved, and are under threat by the Internet and its attractive devices.

Yet I believe that a better case against the Internet lies here: where a private family event is made public, not for the enjoyment of Internet users, but as a sacrificial lamb for public moralising. And where it is deemed acceptable that a three-year old child is publicly bullied by so-called online journalists and their readers.

I’m reminded of both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, cautionary tales regarding the future of a society that delights in the public shaming of others. These books come from the same country as this posted article. Maybe Richard Lawson should do some more reading.

When we look on the various representations of religious groups and individuals on personal homepages, in weblogs, in virtual worlds or the like and when we follow their communications on religious topics online, the visual and auditive aspects of the medium seem to play a major role. Using pictures, videos, icons, as well as music and other sounds, the internet users can design a multisensual virtual environment which might implicate its own notion of “aesthetics”.

As the aesthetic and sensual dimensions of religions and rituals on the internet have long been a neglected area of research, we called upon theoretical and methodical reflection as well as on empiric studies referring to these topics. – And many renowned scholars answered with interesting and inspiring articles with which we hope to contribute and give some impulse to the still ongoing discussion on the different theoretical, methodical and methodological approaches to “aesthetics and the dimension of the senses” in the context of religion and religious practice online.