KimChapter8: Rituals: Handshakes, Holidays, and Rites of Passage, in
Kim2000
Discussion leader/summarizer:
PaulResnick
Key Points/Claims
Rituals are small, scripted dramas that give participants a shared, meaningful experience that they can look forward to experiencing again. (p. 279)
Transitions are good opportunities for rituals: arrivals and departures (daily or permanently), changes of status, etc. Greetings and good-byes are especially important.
Kim suggests some specific rituals, such as:
- private greeting from a chatroom host (or from a bot)
- an introductions topic on a message board
- happy birthday greetings, or on anniversary of joining
- holiday celebrations, or, even better, celebration of days that have special meaning within the community but perhaps not outside (e.g., date of founding, birthday of founder or some other heroic figure in the community)
- acknowledge transitions and achievements of members, including both transitions within the community and transitions they may experience outside (marriage, graduation, etc.)
Critique
Some of the suggestions for rituals involve only a user's interaction with a computer, not interaction with other people. For example, getting a birthday greeting from the system when you log in on your birthday. I think those would be less effective, for two reasons:
- There's no sense of a person caring enough to do something;
- There's no sense that the experience is shared. Part of what makes Google's occasional seasonal home page changes captivating for me is that I know other people are seeing it as well and we might end up joking about it or marveling at it together.
The definition of ritual depends on the notion of "meaningful experience". What exactly makes one experience meaningful and another not?
Connections with other readings, ideas, etc.
We will talk a lot about "meaning" when we read
Wenger1998, though we still won't get a simple definition.
Historically, religious institutions have been very effective at harnessing the power of ritual. If you are religious, do you feel that it cheapens the idea of ritual to use it in such secular ways? If you are not religious, are you uncomfortable with the idea of ritual in online communities you are part of, because of the religious connotations?
Class Discussion
NoorAliHasan: I don't think I associate rituals specifically with religion, rather as an element of a culture, society, community, etc. I wonder if rituals are so powerful in religious institutions due to the significance of their impact. Religions deal with matters that we would all consider fairly serious - the notions of God, salvation, one's purpose in the world, etc. In other words, is it the idea of rituals itself that is powerful or the context within which rituals take place? I think it's a combination of both. Rituals are one way of keeping a community together but depending on how important that community is to the individual, these rituals could easily fall out of practice.
One of the key aspects of a college fraternity is that it uses ritual to bind a dissimilar group of people together through common experience. While my eCommunity is an extremely informal meeting place—more of a bulletin board, in actual use—it is based on a foundation derived from knowledge that each member has experienced the same ritual activities, whether this member of the alumni group graduated three or thirty years ago. It seems as if a similar feeling of commonality would be difficult to develop in an purely online environment: while we all share similar experiences, say, cursing at a Windows systems error, that really isn't much of a reason for me to trust (or like) any of you. Ritual is something that should be carefully, consciously developed by site founders as a means of indoctrination and membership acceptance if it is to be effective. This may be as simple as requiring that everyone post a profile before allowing comments; what is important is knowing that everyone else had to do it, too, so you have something in common with all other users.