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.

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.

I probably haven’t answered the question here. Does anyone have anything to add or change?

What can the Anglican church learn from emerging churches’ online behaviour?
1. That emerging church people don’t use the new media for world domination.
2. That they use them to listen as much as they use it to speak.
3. That they are more interested in sharing information for use on offline contexts, rather than ensuring that the online connection is the be all and end all.
4. That they create online facades that are deeply personal, rather than organisational. I.e. pages and profiles are more about people than they are about groups.
5. That they expect dissent, treat it as a way to help them grow rather than a threat to survival.
6. That they appreciate that a conversation is as good as a conversion, as they accept they are in need of ongoing conversion.

A quick answer would be that young people are living their lives with it. But I wonder if the question actually was meant to be, “How are young people becoming religious?”, or something like that.

Safe things to say:
1. That young people are less likely to align their religious identity with a local church, group, para-church body, organisation, denomination or institution than previous generations.
2. That even regular young church-goers would get more information about how to be religious from sources outside the church than within it. Friends, movies, TV, magazines, all that stuff.
3. That this shift away from organised religion is also true in other spheres of life. Young people are also less likely to align themselves with a political party, a civil action group (I know Greenpeace wonders where all the activists have gone), a volunteer organisation than past generations.
4. That this doesn’t mean young people are less political, activated, even religious. It just means their choice of expressing these parts of their identity is different.

Difficult things to say:
1. That denominational expressions of Christianity are on their way out for good.
2. Aberystwyth.
3. That this is not just a trend, a slow social change. This is an ideological shift that is due in part to the mistakes made by institutional churches, which they(we) need to address. The spiritual abuse of young people is an important one, though by no means the only one.

The Catholics have set up a Christian alternative to Facebook called XT3 which doesn’t look so bad. It was established in the advent of WYD08 but I think it’s kept going. I think they have priests and counsellors and youth workers on the site. The Uniting Church has The Transit Lounge which is at first sight a simple structured web site but has paths to discussion groups and blogs.

The Sydney Anglicans have extended their web presence to include a variety of blog and podcast feeds, which seem to be a web-based extension of resources for parishes and groups, but there are forums and a news feed. It seems way more institutional based than the others above (e.g. what the Syndey Anglicans are doing rather than what people in the church are doing). However I know there is a sister site for young people around, and I just did a search of my own blog to find a link to it, christianity.net.au, which I think is just pure proselytism, good ol’ Sydney Anglican style. Speaking of proselytism, there’s also the Jesus – All about life campaign.

The Australian Christian Channel has an interesting ministry model and are moving from TV to mobile technologies, and networking with other PayTV entities in SE Asia. I don’t know much apart from this, that I’ve been told by other researchers, but I will hopefully speaking with some of them in the future around a research project.

I can’t remember from the top of my head anything else, but of course heaps of Christians are writing blogs, SNS pages, as are Christian groups and local churches. Tonnes of stuff around.

As I wrote in this paper, I reckon the trend at the moment is for churches to downplay their denominational identity, even the labels of Christians, in favour of talk about God and Jesus. The word Christian is no longer cool, Anglican, Catholic, Pentecostal, Methodist, not cool. God, JC, spirituality and stuff, still okay.

They’re pretty big questions so I got her permission to paste them here. If you have any responses I’d love to read them. The Archdiocese will also be reading the post, and they’re looking forward to reading what you think. I’ll fill in what I can think of at the moment, and will come back from time to time to add whatever else I can dream up. I’ll post them as separate items on the blog.