The Rituals and Ceremonies of Digital Life
What looks like “glued to the screen” behavior to some is a gateway to connection and meaning for others. How did it all start? Where is leading us?
As digital natives reshape conceptions of reality, new rituals and ceremonies have emerged to facilitate bonding and shared experiences online. What is the origin of these world-changing practices? Can we foresee a more human digital future?
Recent history examples include hashtags on Twitter, virtual weddings in gaming platforms, and ways to mark death online. Access to internet-connected devices and the rise of social networks enabled these new digital habits and symbolic expressions. Though nascent, the habitability of a intertwined world will only grow as new generations forge lives spanning natural and virtual environments. Our rites and ceremonies must keep pace.
Dive with us into the recent tech history and let’s understand the origins of this current uncertainty.
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Online Rituals And Ceremonies
One of the most common fears for parents today has to do with the possible effects screen time might have on the cognitive development of their children. On the one hand, this concern is in line with the reactions that new technologies have historically caused. Just as people worried in the 1940s that the home radio would steal children’s attention “right in front of their parents,” ancient Greeks wondered about the effects of writing on memory. On the other hand, this concern is an indication of the generational gap that exists with regards to the use of digital technology. What one generation sees as “being glued to the screen and wasting time” is, for another generation, the jumping off point to reach another world. What is a device for some is a gateway to another dimension for others. While the previous generation values experiences in the Natural Environment as superior, the most recent generation draws no hierarchy between experiences in the two environments. Like in the 1940s, it is clear that when our children are in front of a screen, they are “somewhere else.” Parents and children can easily be sharing a space in the same house but be inhabiting different environments. Sharing natural space is not enough to truly live together; it is more important to share the same dimension of habitability.
Advancements in the Digital Environment and their consequences for all planes of human experience bring about change in the historical relationship between the Natural Environment and the way we collectively and individually inhabit it. But what is the difference between living in a place and inhabiting it? First, habitation is an exclusive practice of people. While living, in its basic expression, is related to a biological condition, inhabiting is an inescapable social need. Drilling into the concept, we might say that it is tied to the ability to recognize and move through a territory, marking it and establishing a relationship of mutual influence. Although the act of habitation is an individual matter, it implies participating in the transformation of space through community participation. And this concept is related to belonging.
Is it then possible to say that human beings inhabit the Digital Environment? Coming back to the example of cities, we can certainly point to a foundation and perhaps note the process of appropriation by individuals, but it is difficult to identify the precise moment in which appropriation gives way to habitability. This is because habitability is related to repeated uses in so far as they become habits. When we try to analyze this process in the Digital Environment, the task is even more difficult: events there occurred much more quickly.
A closer examination of this topic allows us to identify two pillars on which the habitability of the Digital Environment began to be built. The first was our becoming owners of connection terminals and thereby being able to choose when and where to connect. Feeling that we have influence and control over the environment and gaining awareness of the fact that digital technology can also be part of reality changed the way we individually approach that space. However, habitability refers to mature states of collective behavior. That is where we find our second pillar, an idea that we have already begun to explore: ceremonies.
The South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2019) explains that rites are symbolic actions that represent and transmit the values and order that hold a community together. When these are eroded, community deterioration occurs, along with individual disorientation. In Byung-Chul Han’s view, the constant presence of the Digital Environment, in which time rushes along uninterruptedly, represents a blur we cannot hold onto. The South Korean philosopher believes that deterioration and disorientation are characteristics of late modern society, due in great part to its relationship to the neoliberal mentality and its ties to technology.
We agree with Han on the importance of rituals and ceremonies for the cohesion of social fabric. However, where he sees an absence, there is really a world full of expressions and ritualizing activities. This is basically because it is an innate human attitude. People cannot avoid recreating habits and carrying out ceremonies. It is part of our cultural DNA.
This is also how our online activities were transformed into ceremonies with value and meaning. This process was mainly driven by our use of social networks in two directions: it also transformed the way we use those social networks. Little by little, more or less consciously, we codified a way of acting and moving in our digital lives. For example, some groups created their own terms and conditions or ways of introducing themselves into society in order to join a social network. All of these practices are ways of drawing boundaries and reinforcing expectations about what constructive interaction means in the Digital Environment.
One well-known example is the use of hashtags on Twitter. In one of the many collective ceremonies that arose on that social network, users began to use a particular grammar to create labels in messages. Leveraging the algorithm that counts the number of times a term is repeated in order to measure trends, tweeters got into the habit of including short chains of characters without spaces in their posts, beginning with the # sign. This allows them to read related messages and even boost topics on the agenda. This was the birth of the hashtags that are now used on almost all social networks. Some integrated them into their interface (like Instagram) and allowed users to follow hashtags to share topics with each other. They are even used on social networks on which they have no functionality, which is an indication of their ritual nature. It is that collective aspect of identity and exchange with the group that gives value to these activities. Because of the way the interfaces of these networks took shape and the rituals that arose among users themselves, creating a profile on a dating app, joining a Zoom meeting, or attending a class online while the teacher is in a different country became ceremonies. Ceremonies are symbolic codes that allow us to interpret events in our daily lives, help us navigate difficult situations online, and appreciate positive ones. They are actions through which we assign meaning.
Another clear example of how we created ceremonies and moved our most important ones to the digital sphere is how we relate to death in an environment in which, given its immaterial nature, it would seem unthinkable. A few years ago, Facebook created the Legacy Contact: it is possible to assign permission to a friend to take over your account in the event of your death. Before that, deceased people’s profiles were erased or turned into virtual graves where people could continue to leave messages. This policy was implemented after the family members of deceased users asked to download and keep photos of their loved ones and notify their network of their death. Funeral rites are symbolic strategies that regulate relationships between people and their culture. Just as we need representations of the dead in our daily lives, we began to need them in our online lives. This is a process that surpasses mere appropriation and shows that we have gone a step further.
In the same way that the Digital Environment had to adapt to the needs of collective funeral ceremonies, virtual spaces arose that proved to be ideal for other types of ceremonies. One of humanity’s central rituals is the one that celebrates and makes public the promise of love between two people. In 1994, the game CyberMind was the venue for the wedding between one of its employees and her fiancé. However, we can highlight what happened in 2017 on the virtual platform Rec Room as a milestone that sums up the progress of those first decades: Priscilla and Th!nk met, fell in love, and got married in a virtual reality environment. They shared hours of conversation and games as avatars during which they moved from getting to know each other to becoming close friends and finally to getting engaged and moving in together. Beyond the papers they had to sign in the Natural Environment, a video uploaded to YouTube is proof of the number of emotions involved in the ceremony that took place in cyberspace. The virtual kiss drew cheers and applause from dozens of characters who floated in a 3D gazebo.
Another concrete expression of our digital habitability is how the legitimacy of our signatures was constructed in this new space. Digitally signing documents that have a material impact in the Natural Environment speaks of the value of a contract entered into in the intersection between both spaces. Also, and more importantly, it is proof of the virtual implementation of one of the most fundamental civil institutions in our society: identity and consent. Accepted in 2022 by the majority of nation states, digital signatures guarantee and affirm the presence of an individual with natural personhood under the law while simultaneously certifying the validity of a contract that has consequences in the Digital and Natural Environments interchangeably.
In the next episode:
Learn how Meta and Nvidia are trying to shape the Digital Environment and what their motivations are.
Digital Pilgrims is a podcast based upon the book “Digital Pilgrims. Towards a Quantum Humanity”.
