Thread by @SamuelSThorp

Studying digital ritual.

Interesting how Christians, Pagans, Secular and others all have parallel arguments about the location of "meaning":

- in the act
- in the understanding of said act
- in the intention of the agent
- (there is no "real" meaning)

Much of this seems to come back to the philosophically basic concept of subject and object.

In ritual, the objective element would be "what happens" while the subjective would be "the experience of what happens".

This issue with our western implicit biases is that we like to polarise the things we can distinguish. Objective is different from subjective and therefore "is not" subjective.

I think it's likely that in the case of ritual the "meaning" is located in the interplay between the two; the relation of the subjective to the objective, and of the objective to the subjective.

As such instead of dividing the first three locations (action, understanding, intention) meaning is likely the culminative product of each of them.

I wonder, if we were to think about #UpstreamTwitter, what would we say our rituals (our "sets of actions practised with common methods") were?

Fitness
Game
Creativity (blogs/podcasts/email lists)
Marketing/Self-promotion/Sales
Divination/Forecasting

Then there's our incessant "twittering".

In a sense, each tweet is a ritual of creation set within ritualised parameters of interaction.

And then there's the "offline" ritual of checking twitter.

Some will check at particular times. Some on mobile, others only on a lap/desktop. Do you always get a coffee or climb into bed before you check twitter? That's a ritual of sorts.

This raises the follow up question.

Not just, where is the meaning of a ritual - but what IS a ritual?

Digital rituals take place in networked communities of storied selves.

Twitter, as a social media where users engage primarily with those of shared interests, promotes storied communities that develop through recognition of converging practices and shifting grounds of authority.

As such it's no surprise that we see the growth of events like #21Con or #MenofMarch or those who implement @AJA_Cortes's workouts and advice, because digital rituals are seldom purely digital; there is a tangible human participating for whom the ritual occurs both on and offline

It's this instinctive understanding of the real world impact of digital rituals that lends hope to those wishing to effect change in the world by tweeting.

Indeed, it's the interplay between the locations of meaning in digital ritual which gives rise to memetic warfare and empowers it to be considered 'magic'.