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.

Please feel free to leave a comment on our comments pages, or on our twitter feed.

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.

I have been invited to give a series of lectures in Kerala, India. While that may sound ubercool, the reality is that my fellowship had bought tickets for me to go to a conference there, but the conference was cancelled, and the fellowship didn’t want to waste the tickets, so they’re putting me to work. But I am uberexcited about it. I’ve heard many wonderful things about IMPACT, the organisation that is hosting me, and I feel honoured to have this opportunity.

Here are a few of the topics I’ll be talking about:

Human interaction in Cyberspace

The worldwide web (internet) is a virtual world (Cyberspace) alongside our natural world. Internet technology helps humans create social environments that shape their understandings of self, the world, and the other. Particularly, the web 2.0 technology and the networked communities, blogs and podcasts provide virtual space for all forms human interaction.

Religion Online

Ever since the birth of internet, religion is present and active in cyberspace. The increasing popularity of these Internet tools to express a religious identity and seek connections with others has impact on how people participate in religious institutions in the real world. Many fear that religion online will lead to the ultimate demise of organized religions like Christianity. Others think that the democratizing force of online religion affects the authority of the traditional religious offices. What is the future of religion in the digital age?!

Godcasting: exploring religious audiences and podcasting communities

Today, religious programs are the second most popular genre of podcasting. Blogging and podcasting are working to create and enhance online religious communities, and shape relationships between producers and consumers of podcasted religious content. Specifically, it is interesting to explore how bloggers connect online life in a highly technologised society with traditional notions of religious life. This workshop will be an exploration on how the web 2.0 technology and the networked communities, blogs and podcasts provide virtual space to explore new forms of religious expression.

IMPACT is is a Portal for Communication Research, Training and Formation. It is a Christian response to the challenge of the emerging communication culture. IMPACT program aims at forming leaders conversant with the predominant and emerging communication culture.

Many posts and discussions in the blogs examined focus on corporate and personal faith practices. These include the presentation of liturgies and prayers written by bloggers, journaling of preparations for community worship services, private prayer regimens, and discussions on traditional and contemporary worship styles as practised in churches. Evident in these conversations is a desire to reclaim and renovate practices and symbolic environments that appear lost in recent Protestant history.

Bloggers reveal their interest in private devotional and meditational practices, including contemplative prayer and lectio divina. Some bloggers talk of their desire to inject into their daily lives a sense of the monastic, to engage in practices that bring the sacred into ordinary living. Some bloggers speak favourably of rituals borrowed from other faiths and new religious movements.

In conversations about corporate worship, bloggers show they do not enjoy the light and sound shows of many contemporary Sunday services. They tend to resist the directive styles of music lyrics and liturgies that either conform to strict theological principles or are filled with redundant words (especially “I just really want to…” type prayers). They enjoy the use of art and popular music to create audio-visual environments that gently guide people through an experience of the sacred. The poems, prayers and liturgies offered use themes and motifs borrowed from urban living to connect love, pain, joy and loss with God’s story of hope and renewal.

In the conversations about the purpose and nature of Christian worship, these emerging church bloggers want to dissolve the distinctions made between religious and secular text, and sacred and profane spaces. They do this by suggesting the use of popular images, music and other texts in otherwise traditional services, and through the use of art installations, promote the creation and mediation of experiences of the sacred in other public spaces. In their personal lives, they show a desire to break away from the “Sunday Christian” lifestyle by bringing the religious into everyday living.

In some cases, blogging itself is considered part of this spiritual regimen. Bloggers present posts for the sole purpose for encouraging others to contemplate and share stories, or to meditate on the words or pictures on screen and tell of their experience of doing so. Others treat the blogosphere as a confessional space, telling stories of their daily rights and wrongs and requesting absolution and support from their readers. Others ask readers to pray with them on private or public issues, and offer a prayer to be read by their audience, or a picture to meditate on.