The use of Web 2.0 technologies, and particularly blogging, for constructing online religious identities and communities, does highlight areas of concern when considering how Australian Christianity may look in the next decade:
The discursive construction of religious identity
Like producing any personal home page, the act of blogging is the act of online identity construction. With great agency, bloggers, in their sharing of religious experiences, debates on doctrine and reflections on the works of religious writers and artists, explicitly negotiate the labels and discursive practices encountered in their offline religious life, to work out a place for themselves as a new kind of Christian in a new world. Not unlike the rules, rituals, etiquettes and language that one learns when joining a local church, the blogosphere contains its own sets of discursive practices that inform and guide producers and respondents to blog material. Religious bloggers learn, adopt, promote, challenge and adapt these practices according to their religious sensitivities, and vice versa.
Not a community, a network
Even in Oldweb, social relations can be mapped according to certain centres of engagement, such as an email group, chat room or online social group. The blogosphere lacks such centre; each blog is a site for engagement, and each blogger has their own unique set of relations with other bloggers. No two bloggers enter the environment in the same place, or meets the same group of people online. On the one hand, the blogosphere is free from the constraints imposed from religious organisations who establish Oldweb sites for religious community (but not from those of the makers of blogging software). On the other hand, any more “formal” organisation or activity that arises out of blog-based networking must not stay in the blogosphere.
Nothing is private
In an article for Continuum, Cohen considers the questions, “Are bloggers narcissistic?” and concludes that only in that there is a certain divide between private and public discourses could bloggers be considered as such, by thrusting private conversations into the public sphere. Moreover, bloggers don’t make the private public, but reject the divide that has been in place in Western culture (Cohen, 2006). All discourses in the blogosphere are public, regardless of their content, form or intended audience. We can only assume that the daily prayer regimen of an elderly woman living in The Kimberley would have the same “exposure” to a potential audience as the carefully researched and meticulously worded theological treatise of an urban archbishop.
Ideologies of gender, age, education and ordination in Australian churches have determined who is in a position to speak of religion in the public sphere. The blurring of the divide between public and private discourses may lead to doubt regarding the stability of these positions and the ideologies that support them.
Who practises religion anymore?
As the YouTube incident, described above, illustrates, even the hidden lives of clergy are vulnerable to exposure. Those who practise religion publicly, who create content for religious media (whether that be the pulpit, the bound book or the television) must now acknowledge that their congregation members, their audiences, their consumers, can produce religious material with equal ease and for a comparable audience. Web 2.0, together with mobile media technologies, suggest that a redefinition of not just the public/private dichotomy be made, but also dichotomies of producer/consumer, performer/audience, practitioner/congregation.
How these challenges and opportunities are being embraced right now is the focus of this study.
