What a beautiful old city. The architecture is breathtaking, and there are some fantastic displays of urban art. I didn’t realise how classy my hotel room is, but a lot nicer than any of the modern hotels we get now. Really good luck on my part. The flu is slowly going away, thanks to a lot of sleep last night. But there is now way I was going to allow myself to miss any daylight hours here. I’m waiting for Jaime and his son to meet me so I’m posting these photos now. By the way , I must be close to the honeymoon suite; some fantastic sounds coming through the walls here. Gotta love South America!!!

The rest of the conference seemed a little lighter after I did my bits. I was very tired. I had been enjoying too many caipirinhas at night with Ryan, Craig and Curtis - perhaps I drank more in the week than I had done all year - couldn’t help myself; too goddamn tasty. I noticed that people were walking around in T-shirts when I was in a jumper and jacket and shivering. By the end of conference on Thursday night I realised I was having the shakes, and knew it was flu. By that time I had made plans to go out samba dancing, touring the centre of Sao Paulo. Instead I spent thirty hours in bed. I’m now in the airport on the way to Santiago for three days of touring, but I’m sure not much will be done. More sleep, less fun. Poo.

I had three presentations at the conference, a paper session on Tuesday afternoon, a plenary session on Tuesday evening and a panel presentation on Wednesday morning. All went really well. The first paper session had others all doing online religion studies, and people came to me afterwards saying that my presentation offered a lot of solutions to the problems the previous presenters were talking about.

I was very nervous for the plenary session. Firstly I was nervous because I was speaking to the entire conference on a research topic that I only did in a month. Secondly I was nervous because I was introduced to the conference as Professor Emerson, who already got his doctorate in online religion research, and was a world leader in the discipline. But mostly I was nervous because when I stood up to speak all the lights went out and a spotlight was placed on me. It made me want to shout out “Heeey Sao Paulo, are you ready to learn?!!?” in a Spinal Tap fashion. But it also meant I couldn’t read my notes. So I just talked from what I could remember, using the PowerPoint slides as a guide. And I made as many jokes as I could.

People afterwards talked about how funny I was, and how they didn’t notice the time go by, and some even asked why I was in research, that I should be in stand-up. Made me wonder the same thing, given nobody commented on the project or presentation at all. My supervisor said I did really well, though it doesn’t qualify me for a professorship. Damn.

But Wednesday morning’s panel was truly brilliant. I was with Mia Lövheim, Lynn Clark and Nabil Echaibi. All were Associate Professors with doctorates. We were talking about trends in researching religion online, and what the future holds. I didn’t really prepare for it, but I managed to answer all questions posited to me, and there were times when Lynn would reference me in an answer to a question given to her. That was, like, way cool. I was totally chuffed by that.

The best bit though was that during the presentation we were positing what the future of online religion research might look like, and we kind came up with an answer. Now this question is really the conclusion of my PhD thesis, and I think I have something to offer. It’s going to make for an important piece, placing it within a tradition but helping set new directions. I am going to write a paper on it for my supervisor when I get back, and I’ll post it here when I’m done.

Rianne Subijanto, of NYU, made a great presentation of Islamic TV in Indonesia. She offered some findings of the projection of authority in some TV shows, which run in parallel to what we are finding in online Christianity, specifically, that the personhood of authority is removed while religious information is promoted as authoritative through the audiovisual text. As soon as she finished, I introduced myself to her and then got her to meet my supervisor, saying that in our project on media and religious authority we must get her involved. Rianne was a fantastic person, she matched my humour really well. We become Facebook friends.