fishers, surfers and casters

If Jesus were alive today, what would he tweet? Which gods would have the most number of facebook “likes”? Is it O.K. to take your smartphone to the toilet if your Torah or Bible app is open on it? These may seem like frivolous questions, but interactive, mobile social media, dubbed Web 2.0 is increasingly becoming the medium through which people explore spirituality, raising new questions that challenge religious authority and the meaning of religious community.

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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G’day everyone,

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.

At CMRC, David Michel, from Dalhousie University (Canada), told his story of a small conservative Christian community on the Atlantic side of Canada, who wanted to go live online, by video-streaming their services.

One of the big questions affronting the small congregation was what could be in the view of the camera, and what would be shielded from the eyes of viewers online. Some people believed there were parts of the inside of the church that shouldn’t be seen by people who weren’t in the building. Others believed their were sections of the service where private information about members were shared, and also shouldn’t be seen by those participating through computer screens. For David, but more so for me who listened to his story, it raised questions about how people negotiate private and public in a church community, and how people consider the internet as a public space.

It seems, by the small introduction to the church community that I was given, that the notion of the church service as a public event had been eroded away among its members by its recent history. In the years where the congregation’s numbers dwindled, and where one-time visitors were seen increasingly seldom, the church service was conducted among people who “knew” each other to the point where being together was a private event. Even if there were people present at a service whom congregants did not “know”, at least congregants were fully aware in the space of who their audience was, to the point of better control over how to present information and themselves in a setting that appeared private.

Yet for the congregants, the Internet was seen as the opposite. Going live through video-streaming was, for them, like placing themselves in a panopticon, a Big Brother House where *everyone* could see them, and they could see nobody in return. Going live online for them was a test where the search for new and distant friends and fellow congregants required the relinquishment of control over their own church environment.

Somewhere in this dichotomy of “landline church = private” versus “online church = public” is the reality, which deserves further exploration and requires time and experimentation. I wish them luck.

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.