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.

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.

I am thinking that these issues become more salient when we think about Internet access through mobile technologies, such as phones and e-readers, yet this has been neglected in my own research. I’ve recently been given the opportunity to collaborate on a research project on the iPhone as an object through which religious experience is accessed and mediated. I have some preliminary thoughts which revolve around four key words:

Device – how does the iPhone as an object that is seen and held by its users create the aesthetic conditions for religious experience? Historically, our Internet experiences have been framed by the technology that has sat on desks in private work or study rooms, family rooms, on our laps. It shouldn’t be overlooked that the location of these devices have played a part in the total sensory experience of being online. The pocket-sized, hand-held device, then, changes that experience.

App – how does the applications’ software, based on the operating software of the device, frame the religious text that is produced, consumed and exchanged between connected users? The graphic user interface of the home computer has provided us with vehicle for interactions with others and with the technology, and there has always been an aesthetic dimension to this.

Mobility – given that the iPhone is a personal device, how do users feel a connection to an aesthetic community away from the community’s physical place? Online communities are noted for their lack of place, rather defined by shared symbols and languages than by geography. This is not new. Evidence of community formations through communications beyond place even exist in the Bible. What becomes salient for mobile-mediated communities may be the way that people interact with this sense of place. A friend who is Catholic priest told me of a baptism he conducted recently at his local church. The congregation was full of twenty-somethings, who he believed weren’t really present, given they spent most of their time at the ceremony tweeting, heads down, thumbs a-tapping. After the ceremony ended, these congregants mentioned to him what their online friends thought of what was happening during the service, through the replies to their tweets. My friend discovered there were more people at the service than he could physically see and speak with, but who were nonetheless “there”, and involved in what was going on. Mobile technologies allow people to interact online with people away from their computers and back in churches, and allows people not in churches to interact with people who are.

Cloud – to what extent is physical place known and valued to users, given that all religious text is stored in the “cloud” (i.e. on a server in an unknown location)? “Cloud” has joined our growing set of metaphors for connecting online. More and more, we are dependent on our connection to remote servers to store information and do daily tasks, in order to keep our devices small and more mobile. While the “cloud” simply refers to a computer in a location we may be unaware of, the use of the term brings many connotations that will impact on how we think and act with our devices.

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.

The lecture will start at 6.15pm on Thursday 23 September. More info, including location, is all here. If you’d like to go, shoot me a message so I can look out for you. I’m looking forward to it. Carr has some interesting issues to raise. Better yet, the lecture is only for an hour, which is good because lectures are like, soooo long usually.

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.