Virtually Sacred: The Performance of Asynchronous Cyber-Rituals in Online Spaces - The Diigo Meta page

• 03 Sep 12
  

  Joshua Madara
• 12 Mar 09
  

  ResourceLink BCEO

  The site hosts a paper by Lecturer Stephen Jacobs, exploring the idea of cyberrituals. He investigates the concepts of sacred space, ritual and prayer and what that means in an online world.

  cyber rituals ritual SOR

• 03 Oct 08
  

  Gerhard Stoltz
  • These sites are not unique; there are a growing number of religious sites from diverse traditions that are attempting to construct distinct online sacred spaces and provide facilities for the performance of cyber-rituals.
  • Sacred places located in geographical space are often identified by particular signifiers, such as architectural style, use of images, and expected protocols of behavior. This leads to the question of whether virtual signifiers can operate in an analogous fashion, demarcating sacred cyberspace from profane cyberspace.
  • the sacred manifests itself in the profane world in what Eliade terms a hierophany
  • For the believer, crossing the threshold of a sacred building signifies a move from profane to sacred space. Michael Benedikt (1993) proposes that information in cyberspace "quite literally" has "an architecture"
  • we have to understand sacred space as process and encounter, rather than simply as place or structure.
  • Qvortrup suggests three aspects of spatial experience: the perception of space (primarily a visual and aural experience), being in space (movement through space), and the practice of space (interacting with objects in space). Consequently it is important to identify all these aspects in the analysis of the websites.
  • The act of signing in signifies a threshold, and functions in a similar manner to the intermediary page of the drawing found on the Virtual Temple pages. It connotes a crossing over into a designated zone of religious activity.
  • if we accept Jones's (2000a) thesis that sacred space must be understood in terms of the encounter with architectural forms, it is necessary to consider how these virtual architectural forms might facilitate ritual encounters.

  •   

    Ritual is a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication. It is constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts often expressed in multiple media, whose content and arrangement are characterised in varying degree by formality (conventionality), stereotype (rigidity), condensation (fusion) and redundancy (repetition). (p. 119)
  • the Virtual Temple does not provide the possibility of synchronous interaction, and aside from a small and underused chat room, there is no facility for synchronous ritual performance in the Virtual Church. Consequently, the focus of these sites is on the performance of asynchronous rituals.
  • Puja basically involves a sequenced offering of items to an image
  • there is no direct relationship between the signifier and signified. The meaning is conventional. No one who is not conversant with the symbolic conventions of Hindu iconography would be able to discern any particular meaning from the image. However, for Hindu devotees, the murti is an index, as the murti is regarded as a manifestation of the deity in an analogous way to the fact that smoke is an index of fire.
  • The performance of virtual puja, like offline puja, is characterized by redundancy, in that it conveys no new information but does confirm the Hindu identity of the performer.
  • Underlying this view of the Prayer Room is the concept that, although there is always a place for individual private prayer, collective prayer is an essential element of Christian worship.
  • The aniconic aesthetic is defined by Goethals (1990) as "the exclusion of representational arts particularly from the liturgical setting" (p. 2). Consequently, there is a much greater emphasis on linguistic as opposed to visual signifiers. This is consistent with the importance placed on the concept of "the Word" in Christianity¹¹ and with the centrality of scripture and preaching in Protestant forms of Christianity.
  • However, despite providing a new arena, these examples do not seem to have a particularly significant impact as yet on the way in which sacred space is conceived or ritual is performed. The virtual is primarily conceived by the designers of both of these sites in terms of simulation—a false approximation of the real. This consequently places a limitation on the ways in which the potentiality of cyber-environments has been exploited

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• 27 Aug 08
  

  Wildcat2030 wildcat
  • The World Wide Web has been conceived of as parallel to geographical space (Tække, 2002).² The term "cyberspace" can be understood as a void for actual and potential computer-mediated activity, in a way that is homologous to the conception of geographical space as a void for actual and potential physical activity. This notion of space as a void, that is as having no physical attributes, derives from a Platonic notion of space as being in opposition to empirical categories (Lefebvre, 1991). Sacred places located in geographical space are often identified by particular signifiers, such as architectural style, use of images, and expected protocols of behavior. This leads to the question of whether virtual signifiers can operate in an analogous fashion, demarcating sacred cyberspace from profane cyberspace.
• 06 Jan 08
  

  Michel Bauwens

  Designers envisage the Christian Virtual Church and Hindu Virtual Temple websites in terms of conventional notions of sacred space and ritual performance.

  P2P-Spirituality P2P

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