Changing the Face of Religion

My vision for our final project is to dig deeper into the ways that religion today is using new media and technology - (and perhaps how the media/technology is using religion). The world today is mediated in a way that is changing so rapidly, and it seems as though we're sometimes running to keep up. Religion also changes with the times and culture, but can it keep up? And beyond that can it use the multitude of new media as a tool?

For example, within the Christian church, a new missions strategy is forming to reach people groups in Africa using mobile phone technology. An important source for this is The Little Phone That Could: Mobile-Empowered Ministry by Keith Williams and Leith Gray which details the project.

Another interesting source is Globalization of the Electronic Media and Universality of Religion: Convergence or Divergence by M. R. Saeidabadi which speaks to how both religion and electronic media have an increasingly global scope and how they interact with each other.

Why Blog?

I’ve been wondering lately, what’s the point of blogging? I suppose if you have a readership looking for specific information it’s great. My only previous experience with blogging was for a trip I went on. I spent the summer in Papua New Guinea, and in order to keep people back home informed on what I was doing and share stories, I blogged. It was much easier than having a mailing list, and let far more people access it, (not that there were that many people reading it). When I got home, my friends and family already knew some of my stories because they’d been reading the blog. That made the task of summing up my life changing summer a little easier.

But without such a very specific purpose, why blog? Right now, this feels more like writing in my journal, (except for the typing part). I’m aware that someone else may read this, I have no idea when or where or why though.  (Except for my professor, who presumably has to read this.) And if this is more like a journal entry, why put it on the internet, where privacy is effectively lost? Why not keep my musings to myself in my journal that sits by my bed?

Even if I want others to read what I’m writing, what on earth do I write? What could I possibly have to offer the masses in a blog? I guess I feel a bit lost here. Any suggestions?

Meaningfully Mediated

What does it mean to be mediated? I'm spending this semester trying to figure that out for a class I'm taking called... Mediate Culture, of course! My professor, Dr. Wesch, has talked about the idea that we are all mediated by the kinds of media we use. Whether that be the internet, television, telephones, texting, social networks, blogs, sites like YouTube, and even things as basic to our lives as language. So in a sense, we are each changed and filtered through the media we consume and create every day... we are mediated.  

You might say that I'm not a very "plugged in" person... but that's precisely why I'm creating this blog. In order to understand how we as a society are mediated, I need to be actively participating in the world of media. It's participant-observation... a term you here in anthropology all the time; a research technique where the researcher not only observes the culture & society he's working in, he participates in it and therefore comes to a deeper understanding of it. 

This isn't just a class project, this is research that I'm genuinely interested in. So please, post your thoughts, comments, questions, anything... I want to know what YOU think about technology, media, & culture. How are you mediated?