You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2008.
It’s interlibrary loan time!
The Dawson & Cowen book arrived yesterday, which is great. Started reading on the train home, it’s got lots of useful comments and suggestions.
However, it’s relatively recent (2004) but some of the papers are older. Even 2004 is a long time in web use; the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon (however you choose to define it) has changed a lot of the way ‘the Internet’ is created and managed. Does the more collaboratively constructed web still have the same problems as a hierarchical web site may have had? YouTube makes us all potentially broadcasters so how does that affect distinctions that have been drawn in past examinations of different kinds of media?
So already the pages are covered in question marks with things to follow up and try to place in a very contemporary context.
Other disciplines don’t have this problem do they? Opinions change, I suppose, regarding authors or poems, for example. But the thing being examined isn’t such a moveable feast (unless it’s an in-depth examination of the WRVS’ contribution to Meals on Wheels). 2004 feels too historical already.
I am very pleased as I have just found a copy of a book that looks like it is going to be fairly crucial on Amazon for £14. Much cheaper than getting bits of it from the BL. It’s called Religion Online: Finding faith on the internet, a 2004 collection edited by Lorne Dawson and Douglas Cowan. Pretty much everything I have read so far has referenced at least one article from this collection so I am very keen to find out what all the fuss is about.
But, I bet there is nothing talking about the experiences of UK Christians/ churches and the internet. You’d think that we were a technological backwater; so far I have found nothing – no interest, no writing, no recent research on what’s happening in the UK. Yet the first search engine directory I looked at had 45,000+ church websites listed. So there must be something going on here…
