Fusion is the phenomenon whereby persons are connected to media devices in a way that captivates them and then influences the way in which persons go about thinking and living in the world. The definition of media here is broad and includes television, social media, use of the personal computer, use of smart phones, and video-gaming. This work investigates and demonstrates the way participation affects persons. The other phenomenon connected to fusion, the subject-media process, which is the mechanism whereby the masses are affected by these media and the representations they promote, greatly influences the masses because people follow the information and images in a way that is quite concerning. The premise here is that media have come to replace ritual life and the meaning ritual provides.
In this book, media is defined and specified as all visual and auditory representations, especially on screens or monitors. What is not meant here is “the mainstream media,” nor ideological notions such as “leftist” or “the Right.” The field of media studies has been aware of the ritualistic way in which individuals use media for some time now. Karin Becker has the understanding of ritual events as “spontaneous performances.”1 Becker goes on to state rituals “deconstruct a dominant social hierarchy and its values.”2 The essential function and process of the subject-media process is to create meaning and sustain it in such a way as to move the
1. Becker, “Media and the Ritual Process,” 629.
2. Becker, “Media and the Ritual Process,” 629.
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masses through a global reorientation or paradigm shift. This deconstruction does not lead to social justice but has no particular aim other than to propel the agendas of the hegemonic forces of the time. It is not obvious there is any justice done necessarily by the media ritual process; it tends to be interested in promoting the consumption of further media. This does not exclude the use of media to promote agendas, though this can certainly happen. It should also be noted that media can be used for control and propaganda. Becker also states that “conceptualizing ritual as cultural performance can clarify how media are used in the construction of meaning.”3 Fusion and the subject-media process are not directive intentional phenomena; therefore, the notion of media as Becker indicates, creating a “public event’s significance as an inclusive cultural performance” is not in the purview of what media ritual does in society in the postmodern cyberspace age.4
Nick Couldry states there are those who argue the use of the term ritual flies “in the face of many claims that we live in an age of ‘de-traditionalisation’” and that from that position ritual is a part of the “relics of the past.”5 Couldry brings up the relevant point that Maurice Bloch and Pierre Bourdieu raise: ritual has been used for conflict management and for masking inequality.6 Ritual, Couldry argues, “remains an important term in grasping what media do and how social institutions work.”7 Couldry also proposes that media serve as an organizational function and offer connectivity for members of society. There is the matter of social cohesion, which fusion only provides on the virtual level; this is a questionable assumption, given the nature of virtual relationships. Biswarup Sen suggests that through information reciprocating there is a certain “‘thing-like’ aspect of information” which “enables it to function as a ritualistic tool that helps shape our selves.”8 Sen discusses the relationship
3. Becker, “Media and the Ritual Process,” 630 (emphasis original).
4. Becker, “Media and the Ritual Process,” 639 (emphasis original).
5. Couldry, “Media Rituals,” 60.
6. Couldry, “Media Rituals,” 61.
7. Couldry, “Media Rituals,” 61.
8. Sen, “Information as Ritual,” 1.
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between the online and offline self, stating: “information as ritual does for the contemporary self what communication as ritual does for society.”9
Sen alliterates the way in which the “online self” attempts to substantiate themselves in the virtual world when he writes about the “self” that “ceaselessly manufactures subjective bits to disseminate them along the objective, informational grid of the network.”10 Sen is missing what fusion demonstrates well. In fusion, the subject and object, or the virtual and the actual, or any other dialectical experience, is dissolved as the univocal speaks for the process and the person becomes one with the media process. What remains missing in the exploration of ritual in media studies is the resolution of dialectical thinking. The recognition of the one in lieu of the dual is critical in understanding how the person or subject experiences only the process and is one within fusion.
In a discussion of ritual, Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran state that Mircea Eliade, a famous historian of religion, “relates the notion of the Other to the establishment of man as man-at-home in the world. He highlights place as phenomenon of return where the movement is always from chaos to cosmos, from the dispersed to the centered, from non-place to place.”11 Another understanding is that of the sociopsychological perspective, which takes into account the relationality of ritual participants. An example of the way participation in ritual affects each individual is found in a study of synchronous arousal, which is related to empathy and affective mirroring. When studying fire-walkers and the coupling of experience and socially modulated affects, Ivana Konvalinka, et al., demonstrate “the synchrony of the physiological markers shared by the two beings (both fire-walkers and onlooker) cannot be due to direct exchange of matter or energy, leaving only the information available to spectators and participants as the basis of the coupling.”12
9. Sen, “Information as Ritual,” 2.
10. Sen, “Information as Ritual,” 7.
11. Gurevitch and Aran, “Never in Place,” 136.
12. Konvalinka, et al., “Synchronized Arousal,” 8518.
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For the spectators of the ritual there is a physiological synchrony, which happens in the observation.
Pascal Boyer and Pierre Liénard express the following judgment on the matter of social investment in ritual and the cost of such as follows: “It is a cognitive and evolutionary puzzle that humans perform rituals, given the waste of time and resources involved.”13 This critical approach is far removed from the religious and philosophical speculation of Mircea Eliade. What can be learned from scholarship about ritual, from religion, psychology, philosophy, social psychology, and anthropology seems certain to construe ritual in many different ways. However, it seems participation in ritual is powerful on an individual and a group level, regardless of one’s disciplinary orientation. What the process of ritual reveals about media involvement is significant. Dru Johnson points to the performative nature of who and what persons are when he states: “Some of us wait until life has broken down before examining our ritualed world. But others of us want to understand our rituals now. When we do, we discover ways to foster and sustain good ritualed lives, lives aimed at discernment and flourishing.”14 In the spirit of this understanding, what is sought to be made known is that ritual is something that has been stolen by media, and so too identity is robbed of the person and the masses by media.
Media have become such a large part of our lives; indeed, they have become our lives. Some examples of the ways the people are fused to or embedded in media are as follows.
People spend thousands of dollars on digital signs to attract the public to church events. Screens (television monitors) have become commonplace in churches, from their prayer chapels to their worship areas. People invest in expensive websites; Sunday school classes critique movies; and youth group members post their selfies on Instagram. People worship via the screen, vicariously feeding on the content they view. But through the subject-media process, ritual is divested of its power and transformed into media. According to James K. A. Smith, people “work with some
13. Boyer and Liénard, “Why Ritualized Behavior?,” 612.
14. Johnson, Human Rites, 2.
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fundamental (though unstated) assumptions about what sorts of creatures (they) are—and therefore what sorts of learners (they) are.”15 People have assumptions about who they are, but these assumptions get shifted by the identificatory powers of media participation. It is notable that the deity did not want the people of Israel to participate in the rituals and idolatry of other people groups, because the deity desired that the Israelites be identified as the deity's own. Persons are transformed by the deity's rituals, but now they are constructed by media representations. The children of Israel participated in the ritual of worshiping the golden calf, crafted by their own hands, at the foot of Mt. Sinai. This ritual, which Israel participated in, was sacrilege, disgusting in both the eyes of the deity and Moses. Participating in the multitude of media rituals could be understood as a similar case of idolatry because of the interest in images on a screen and their power over the subject. The fusion process is a violation by the media process, of which persons fall victim. Idolatry, particularly “I”conography, is a manifestation of fusion. The people are to be defined by its communion with the deity, but this is not happening when media presentation is at the fore. Participation in media through the power media have informs one’s identity. Johnson points out that “Rites always have an invisible arrow through them, pointing toward something else. They dispose us to see something being shown to us, both past and present.”16 The invisible target of media ritual is the church member themselves; unfortunately, being conscious of this is not enough to facilitate one’s escape from the grip of fusion, as we shall see.
15. Smith, You Are What You Love, 2.
16. Johnson, Human Rites, 59.