So I am sitting here on a Saturday afternoon. I more or less missed the 1.5hrs of blazing sunlight earlier today. I stretched like a house-cat in the window and then got back to work.

I am doing some new research on the connection between technologies of text-reproduction and religious beliefs.

More specifically, and very much thanks to my professors help I am looking at some ideas put forward by Elizabeth Eisenstein that the printing press helped splinter religious practice and belief, juxtaposing that with present technological developments in Bible printing and translation like the Semantic Bible and OSIS.

However, as compared to the MySpace essay which basically writes itself whenever I sit in a public space. This essay is really hard.

I feel as though in order to feel comfortable writing about this subject I would have to know 10X as much as I do now about technology print culture, spirituality and text.

But since I only have about 2 days, that just isn't going to happen.

So the lesson here is a couple of things;

#1/ I am really only comfortable writing about things I think I know inside and out. Since that isn't very many things, I have either got to get better at researching, learn to pare down my questions, or focus on one thing to the detriment of everything else in my little noggin.

and;

#2/ I know *a lot* about the Internet. And I mean a lot. I didn't really realize until I started to read about Christian publishing, that there is a huge backstory to MySpace spectacle that I haven't had to learn, I just know it. I know about Arpanet and the history of the WWW. I know about Sherry Turkle and Donna Haraway and that "on the internet nobody knows your a dog". I know about the history of Netscape, and the dot com collapse. I even kinda know how it happened thanks to Jeff.

Which is only to say that the research I am doing now on MySpace has been informed by a ten years of being fascinated by the internet and then actually following up on that fascination through action and engagement. I had no idea how much that knowledge informs my day to day until trying to write a paper on something less related to my lived experience. Nor did I have any idea how intimidating ignorance is.

So the broader lesson I am getting out of this essay-writing double header is that for most of the people in the world the function value, processes and meanings behind the internet are as comprehensible and as important as Christian history is to me.
Which is to say, I think the internet is much more mysterious and arcane than I had realized.

I know I am such a dork. I didn't realize that the internet is a confusing set of ideas with no fixed point of reference to the general majority. What a criminal oversight. It must be my sexy geekdom shining through.