fishers, surfers and casters

Handing in the thesis for examination meant that I could rediscover the joys of weekends and eight-hour snoozes, and I’m happy to report that I regained the ability to listen to my kids’ talking and pay attention to them at the same time. I bought a PS3 and a new TV as a congratulations to myself, and got bored with them almost instantly. Watching television was so much more enjoyable when I was mortgaging precious PhD time. Not so much when it’s the only thing on my agenda for the day.

Now the examination has come back I’m into full swing again. I’m thinking there will be at least two all-nighters a week, a few meaningless “uh huh” and “sure you can” to my children every so often. But while the actual PhD work is not that much, I’m involved in getting a few things published which is cool, but keeping me up. Here’s what I let myself into:

I’m presenting at two conferences, the first of which starts in a couple of days, followed two days later by the second. Both are in Toronto. The first one is the biennial Conference on Media, Religion and Culture, and I’m giving three papers: religious cyborg, godcasting, and authority in the blogosphere. The second is the quinquennial (does that mean every five years?) International Association of History of Religions Conference, and I’m giving the religious cyborg paper. I’m hoping to escape to Montreal for a breather in-between, wallet-willing.

By the time I return to Oz I have an article due for the online journal on religions on the Internet, Heidelberg Online. I have always been really impressed with their publications so I’m really chuffed to have an abstract accepted by them. It’s on how Aussie emerging church bloggers use visual text, including photographs, A/V uploads, and design and layout, to help present their religious identity. I’ve got all the main data and discussion done. The journal edition focusses heavily on aesthetics and the senses so I’m doing a lot of reading on that to steer my arguments correctly. The two big names on religion, media and aesthetics, Birgit Meyer and David Morgan, will be in Toronto, as will the journal editors, so I will be buying people lots of drinks in exchange for wisdom.

Also by the time I get back I will have received peer review comments from an article I’ve submitted to the Journal of Technology, Religion and Theology. It’s a literature review of studies into religion online, with a focus on fourth-wave stuff. I hope it’s good, because going back to old articles and re-editing is such a pain. Then again, it’s something I have to get used to.

I have also just found out I was accepted to write a chapter for a new book called “Networked Sociability and Individualism: Technology for Personal and Professional Relationships.” My chapter will be on religious bloggers and their negotiations of networks and congregational/denominational identity.

It feels good to be able to get these things underway. One regret during my PhD was that, while giving so goddamn many conference presentations, I hardly wrote at all for journals. So this is nice, and I’m aiming that I will get into a writing rhythm that somehow got lost when the new TV arrived.

According the NY Times, undergraduate students are more likely than ever before to copy text from outside sources and pass it off as their own work. The article refers to the comments of lecturers and other university workers and cites a survey, where 40% of about 40 thousand students admitted to small breaches (“copying a few sentences”).

I am not convinced that this article is yet another contribution to moral panic about the Internet’s effect on young people’s education. Sure, everyone uses Wikipedia, and some may think they can get away with it clicking CTRL+C and CTRL+V a few times. Still, I reckon the same could be said 25 years ago when we were doing it with Encyclopaedia Britannica and World Book. One of the article’s interviewees suggests that, because students do not hold a book in their hand, but read it on screen, the text feels somewhat less like it’s the work of another, and requires reference. But I think because it’s on screen, quickly searchable, and not found in a book at the back of the library’s third storey, it’s a lot easier for use to identify plagiarism, especially with respect to Wikipedia.

I would also hazard a guess that about 40% of students in any university in 1990 would admit to doing their own outdated version of copy + paste, at least once during their enrolment, if they knew it was safe to do so.

The article does, however, throw into the ring an idea worthy of further contemplation and conversation. For this new generation of readers and consumers of text, the concept of individual authorship has begun its demise. For Susan D Blum, who is interviewed for the article and is from Notre Dame University, rising plagiarism is an indication of a future where originality and individual authorship are no longer valued. For new generations, once a text is made, it no longer belongs to the author. Creative work, or worthy scholarship, may be found in the mash-up.

Yet the article’s final word is given by she who coins the term “Generation Plagiarism” referring to a cohort of lazy students have been ill-prepared for tertiary life by their high schools. So the moral panic rolls downward.

Hat tip to Gerry McKiernan, whose blog has a wealth of information for those interested in the future of online education and creativity.

Hi everyone,

Just received news that I passed my PhD. I have been given a big list of amendments that I need to make. Good news is that I don’t need to re-submit my thesis, so I reckon I’ll be a doctor by the end of October. For all intents and purposes, then, this is no longer the blog of a PhD student (hooray). It’s now the blog of an unemployed research graduate (poo).

In developing my CV, I have written for myself a teaching and research profile. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A few links here from around the place…

• Jeff Sharlet is one of the authors of Killing the Buddha and Believer, beware, and one of my favourite commentator on religion in American history, politics and journalism. He is about to edit a new book on American religious history, by collecting pieces of literary journalism. I look forward to seeing it out. He talks about it here and seeks help from his blog’s readers.
• Pew has released its fourth edition of The Future of the Internet, and it appears to be a test of people’s responses to arguments introduced by Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google making us stupid?” (see my short post on it here).
• Heidi Campbell writes on her reflections on attending a conference called “Theology after Google” and has got some links to interesting thinkers and talkers whom she met.