VOLUM E 9 – No 3 -4/ 20 13
7 CONTRIBUTORS
9 Introduction – Ritual in the digital age PASCAL LARDELLIER
15 Digital magic, anthropological magic. Mana in the construction of ritual efficacy
NICOLAS MEYLAN
The substantive mana is used by many video games to make sense of magic’s efficacy. It thus echoes the function for which the same term was introduced by the recently formed sciences of religion in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As is the case for games, mana, a word borrowed from Oceanic languages, was mobilized in order to theorize ritual efficiency in magic and religion. This echo is hardly fortuitous insofar as game designers have borrowed the term from academic discourses through a science fiction author. The genealogy thus sketched raises the question of the modalities and ends of the construction of ritual systems be they digital or anthropological.
41 From digital self-measurement rituals to the autopoïetic self-constitution
BÉA ARRUABARRENA,PIERRE QUETTIER
In recent years, the rapid spread of mobile technologies, in particular smartphones and their applications, created new types of connected rituals. By interfacing with the body, these technologies have not only facilitated generating and recording traces of activities, but also provided to the users, the opportunity to act on themselves. Such is the case of the digital self-measurement practices, known as
“personal-measurement”, “self-tracking”, or “quantified self”. Most of
these devices can capture personal data and assess the user’s condition (physical and intellectual activity, weight, sleep, emotions, etc.).
According to a comprehensive approach, this article offers a focus into the tools, the practices and procedures on socio-cognitive processes of generation and interpretation of personal data aiming to produce change.
63 Breastfeeding on the Web. Between biopower and ritual inscriptions NATHALIE GRANDJEAN
In this paper, the author examines the role of web forums dedicated to breastfeeding. By reviewing the discourse promoting breastfeeding, one can observe a discursive formation (Foucault) emerging from the prescriptive requirements of breastfeeding. By analysing the forum posts, the author notes that if the forum has a function of social support, it also contributes to a general biopolitics, in that technologies of power focus both on the mother-child relationship that on the whole population. Moreover, these practices and discourses of breastfeeding also carry digitalized ritual inscriptions, stabilizing a becoming-mother inscribed in societies marked by liquid modernity.
83 The body in the digital rites. Illustration: the video-interview LISE HADDOUK
Digital rituality refers to cyberculture’s myths and beliefs, providing the symbolic function of culture defined by Mauss (1899; 1923-1924).
However, the narcissistic dimension of some uses of ICT must be taken in account to distinguish rituality and compulsion. As in the ritual, body’s implication is an important factor to study in the researches on video-interview - or clinical interview in videoconference-. Elaboration of a technological framework in the form of a website, refering to the methodological framework of clinical psychology with a psychoanalytical inspiration, permits to observe the emergence of the subjectivity among the people interacting. How to work with the psychological reality at a distance, without falling in the trap of a « mirror » connection ? How to adapt a modern life ritual in the computer- aided relation, preserving the symbolic dimension of the exchange in a framework that permits its elaboration ?.
111 The implicit usual rituals on Facebook between innovation and social reproduction
MARIE-AGNÈS DE GAIL
An issue has emerged following previous questioning about social network practices: does the massive exposure of young people's private lives on the Web create new identities and standards of judgment? This research will be developed from several surveys on social networking use since 2007 by young people aged between 17 and 22. In particular, we have focused our analysis on the way photos of boys and girls were judged by their peers, of both sexes. It was particularly interesting to consider this process as mediated by the Facebook network, both in order to understand the peculiarities of the contextual effect of networks in the logic of the underlying regulations and because it seems that technical systems are themselves implicit accelerators enhancing the socio-cognitive processes involved. The processes of cooptation of friends are also simplified and radicalised, thus strengthening social logics and rituals: There is simultaneous reproduction and creation of new standards.
135 Interaction rituals and online forums. A nethnospective analysis of deference and civility behaviors
STÉPHANE AMATO,ÉRIC BOUTIN
This article examines the staging of some interaction rituals on a Web forum: fr.soc.environnement. A nethnospective methodology is used to analyze a few forms of deference (avoidance and presentational rituals) and the use of civility. These analyses are conducted from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The results validate certain hypotheses i.e. the existence of deference behaviors on the digital space studied. They also show a sharp decline in the use of civilities over time. This raises the issue of the non-stabilization of online interaction rituals and social norms of mutual aid.
161 Media practices and rites de passage in teenage years: is there a link?
Examples when teenagers become high school students in Réunion Island
FLAVIE PLANTE
To understand the link between ritual and media pratices, this article focuses on teenagers who become high school students. The hardships they cross during the transition to high school can help us
to understand on the one hand why they develop repetitive and regular media practices and on the other hand what is the importance they give to those. The symbolic functions given to media practices by these teenagers enable us to refer to rites of passage in order to understand the link between ritual and media practices.
187 Kanak mediated interactions: between political conflicts and freedom of expression
LÉONIE MARIN
In the Internet age, the presentation of self is highlighted through the media devices and intersubjectivity becomes a reflexive space.
Through the analysis of mediated interactions based upon a corpus constituted on Facebook, we will see how the digital devices allow greater forms of freedom of expression for the Kanak by identifying certain rites of interactions, online and offline. This discussion refers to the future of New Caledonia, a French overseas country in Oceania. To deepen understanding of individual and collective interactional logic of this territory in the process of self- determination, the multisituated approach promotes understanding of their complexity, making connections between different "sites". In addition, this study also attempts to understand the conception of the mediated interactions occuring with and through the media devices.
211 Digital spiritualism. Digital communication with the beyond FANNY GEORGES
The inner conversion with the dead has always existed, and would even be specific to human being. The web is a new frame to develop such conversation. This phenomenon can be situated in the crossing of two major practicies: on the one hand, the development of post mortem digital identities and in the other hand, the transfer of the spiritualism practicies to digital devices. In the aim to examine these two emerging forms of funeral rites on the internet, this paper proposes an analysis of the cultural lineage of “transcommunication”
or digital spiritualism. The denial of death in the twentieth century gives rise to new forms of dialogue with the dead.
241 Commemorating “bad deaths” in digital spontaneous shrines NATHALIE PATON,JULIEN FIGEAC
This article reveals how Internet users utilize participatory media during the coverage of school shootings to publish their audiovisual
productions and comments online, thus paying tribute to “bad deaths”, that is, innocent lives senselessly taken. The participatory buzz generated by these disruptive media events is reflected in the publication via YouTube, for example, of thousands of audiovisual commemorations composing a sort of spontaneous shrine that can be qualified as digital. We shall show how the arrangement of these shrines, thanks to folksonomy resources, renews funerary rituals, notably media rituals contributing to remembering the victims.
271 The age of the digital humanism, its culture, its rituals, its founding myths. From the great increased hero to the hybrid and civilized Man CATHERINE PASCAL
This text proposes to explore what is the digital culture, nowadays and especially what it represents with its implicit and explicit signs, symbolics, codes, languages, temporalities, Internet network, communities and spaces. From an analysis of its founding myths, by consciously or unconsciously, we will try to commit ourselves to contemporary rituals experienced as signs or marks of a digital imagination. Would we be in the age of digital humanism? If so, what are our responsibilities, our commitments, our risks, our challenges ?
293 Summary/Abstracts
