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.

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Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows, is important. That was evidenced by the turn-out at his free lecture at The Wheeler Centre last night. The room was at capacity, and there were people outside waiting in hope a no-show by someone who reserved a ticket, could mean they might enter. The room was about four or five times as long as it was wide, and all chairs faced the far end where the author and his conversant, Gideon Haigh, would sit. Before beginning, Haigh asked the audience to turn off their mobile phones, their iPhones, iPods and iPads (shame on me, I had brought mine with me in the hope I could make notes and fulfil my paperless aspirations. Alas I had to bring out the ol’ biro and ring-binder). We had to do these things because, Haigh told us, "It’s good to do this once in a while."

So the room compelled us to give Carr and his presenter our deep attention, unable to be distracted by each other or our little devices.

Haigh, an author like Carr, listed his companion’s contributions to all conversations about what his wrong with the new Twitter and Facebook generation. He let Carr talk about the new insights into himself and own capacity for reason once he learned to "back away" from his computer every once in a while. He asked Carr to talk about his theory of intellectual ethic – how each technology is created with assumptions about how humans use their minds – and that while print media are built on the ethic of deep attentiveness, online media encourage the rapid intake of small pieces of information, and value "distractedness, with no room for contemplation."

Carr obliged, of course, as it is what his book is all about. He told us that we humans are naturally wired for distraction, and that we are curious creatures who are built to take in whatever we can through our senses. For Carr, however, the natural state is not the optimal one. "To be attentive is to open up our consciousness and make our culture richer." Haigh wanted to present for consideration that digital natives, like online gamers, perhaps used more parts of their brain while being attentive, but couldn’t do it without telling us he thought them to be "inarticulate social misfits" (this coming from someone who writes books about Cricket). Carr in turn told us that while more parts of the brain are active when engaged with a screen, apparently when reading a book our brain is quieter, and suggested that a broad pattern of cerebral activity is not necessarily an optimal one. That word again.

Haigh prompted Carr to talk about what he thinks the Internet does to reading, writing and thinking. Carr responded with worries that reading is replaced by skimming, that writing is replaced by flashing bits of text, and that the "golden age of expressionism" is lost.

I couldn’t help but I think of another book I had read a few years ago (me, think about books. I know, right?), called A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel. In it is a story about what older adults thought about youth who started to enjoy reading books and scrolls silently and alone, rather than aloud and with one another. Manguel wrote that adults worried that their young were being lost in books, detaching themselves from the world and the richness of culture, disassociating themselves from other humans and drowning in words and mental images. The books are gone, but the moral panic remains.

But then Carr mentioned something that made me go, "Oh, wow. I can’t believe he just said that." When talking about the capacities of information storage he lamented that the Web’s potential to enhance memory is a good thing, but when the Web replaces memory, it’s bad. Umm, when we want to remember things, umm, don’t we write notes? Don’t we access encyclopedias when we want to find out more about something, but keep the volumes so we can go back to them? Isn’t the printed word meant to do that? The capacity of the printed word to store memory increased our capacity for building knowledge and educating each other on specialised topics, fostering the growth of the sciences, humanities, business, communications, and all the other disciplines.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I look at my Facebook page I see a reflection of a rich culture. When friends post photographs, design images, tell me about what’s happening in that specific moment, and I read what their friends think, how they appreciate the comment, I am viewing a lot of social capital, a whole stack of cultural currency being passed around. Sure, not with the same values as we find in published works in libraries, framed works in galleries, or intellectual parlances as heard in The Wheeler Centre, but it is culture.

And maybe it’s just me, but when I can’t remember what the capital of Burkina Faso is, and go to Google or Wikipedia to find out, I don’t think that makes me stupid. I’m not hopping on my bike and going to the local library and picking up a book that’s written by some guy I don’t know and published by some company I don’t know. I’m accessing sites that are written by people I don’t know and organized on the Web by a technology I’m not aware of. But I’m not stupid. I’m just relying on different authorities to give me information.

While I disagreed I took notes and listened and engaged in "deep attentiveness" toward the speaker and his presenter, who moderated discussion. So I thought it quite ironic that when one member of the audience took longer than 40 seconds to complete her comment Haigh started a little "I’m so bored" dance and asked her to hurry up and get to the question.

I think Carr’s book is important. Like Lily Allen’s The Fear, in the face of unbridled consumerism, we need words like Carr’s to remind us that our consumption of technology need not, and should not, determine who we are as humans in bodies and people in cultures. The debate into which Carr has invited us will help us temper technology’s impact on our future. Yet I think people like Haigh and Carr need to realise that when they talk about "losing the richness of culture" they are in fact talking about the failure of their own generation’s culture to stay relevant, and insulting the rich culture of generations of people who are not them. Moreover, when they talk about the ethic of "deep attentiveness", I wonder if they are actually lamenting that such attentiveness is being diverted from authors like them.

Why is it only authors who cry over the death of the author?

* Okay, so Carr and Haigh may not be more than ten years older than me, and it’s really possible that they, like me, are not children of the Dylan years. But I’m a Gen-Xer, and what they talked about was, like, so Boomer.

Some comics in there too.

I’ve read a lot of Castells’ works, and I’ve written a lot about him in my thesis, but every once in a while I’m in a conversation where he is mentioned and I wonder if I read him correctly. So I’m thinking David Bell’s book will help. I also think this will be a good intriduction to the writings of Donna Haraway, who was one of the first to explore the concept of cyborg in contemporary culture, before I get stuck into what she’s written herself. I bought the Kindle version of Bell’s book, so it’d be a good way to start a new reading regime.

How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics

I came across N Katherine Hayles’ Kindle book while looking for David Bell’s Kindle book, and after reading a couple of the “Look inside” pages I thought it was what I was looking for. I expect it to be a great read throughout.

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.

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.

Digital nation: One of my favourite authors, Douglas Rushkoff, engages some of the really big names in Internet research (danah boyd, Sherry Turkle. etc) in a roundtable discussion on what it means to be online. Issues include parenting, participating in the economy, you know, all things Internet and social and moral panicky-like. It’s part of PBS’s Digital Nation series and website. Lots of videos to watch.

The new landscape of the religion blogosphere: The Immanent Frame presents a new report on blogging about religion, considering its place within the larger blogosphere and what religious bloggers think about blogging. Another post in the blog introduces some contributors and readers.