Rituals & Technology in the Digital Age
Rituals, secular and sacred, personal and societal, are key to human survival. What do they mean in our Digital Age?
We all have rituals in our lives. All os us. It’s part of how we navigate our lives, the world around us. They give us comfort, stability and sense-making. We often conflate the word ritual with meaning religious. While there are religious and spiritual rituals, this is not what ritual alone means.
Ritualisation, whether it be personal or in social and community settings plays a very important role in how humans have survived as a species and may play an even more important role in how we integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies into our sociocultural systems.
In groups, either secular or sacred, rituals help to bind us together. In sports, fans and teams alike have regular activities they perform before and after games. Like during the Super Bowl, with wearing team jerseys, having friends over, placing friendly bets and betting pools, the food, drinks and elements that surround the event. In religious, or sacred rituals, they help to form ways of meaning, purpose and shared values. Well, both so in various ways.
You probably have rituals around the use of your smartphone; morning and evening routines around checking messages and social media. This might even include turning your phone off entirely at a preset time before bed.
Many people form rituals around how they interact with voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa or Google. These are usually how we may interact with them, either through saying please or thank-you, the tone of voice we choose to use when we engage with them.
Rituals are a mode of behaviour and just like language relies on an arbitrary set of rules that are constantly in flux, so are rituals through symbolic acts, which have rules as well.
Today, some anthropologists theorize that activities like yoga, meditation classes, forest bathing, are modern forms of ritual that are not necessarily religious. They help us make meaning of our world.
When people create rituals around technology, it is a form of figuring out how important that technology is in our daily lives. When social groups start putting in place rituals and practices around how a technology can or should be used, these are societal rituals. One example would be how education systems are looking to not allow students to use their smartphones during school hours.
Nor should we think about rituals as just preserving traditions. They do. They can also serve as a way of managing change, either in our personal lives or more socially.
Well designed software products enable the application and use of rituals, so does hardware. Good product designers and marketers understand the place and value of rituals. This will be especially important in the development of AI agents and any type of AI product, especially Generative AI for them to succeed at scale.
As AI agents spread into our societies, we will form personal and group relationships with them. Even though these are just one way, para-social relationships, the argument can be made, through the example of how we use voice assistants today and have rituals, we will do the same with AI agents.
A smart AI company developing AI agents, chatbots and various applications, since they are technologies without cultural or physical boundaries, will do well to consider different cultures and how they form rituals around technologies. They’ll end up with a product that has greater sociocultural appeal, offering broader market reach.
This is done by understanding what is called symbolic interactionalism. Which means understanding how humans in various cultures interact symbolically with technology; from pushing buttons to phrases, language and the rituals used to interact with that technology. Such an understanding can help deal with privacy and data concerns, broader social acceptance, prejudices and biases in coding and design.
Rituals are, in both secular and sacred terms, critical to the fabric of being human. Cross-cultural interactions in today’s hyper-connected world have become normal and much faster than ever before. A technology that is only developed within the context of Western or Eastern thinking limits itself to be of value to all of humanity.
Some technologies will, necessarily though, be limited to a particular society because of sociocultural norms, values and behaviours. For example, it is highly unlikely that Western cultures will use an all-in-one platform like WeChat in Asian societies. The two cultures view technologies, their ways of using them and rituals, very differently. Maybe in the long-term, but rarely can a single technology fully change a cultural system at such a degree.
But cultures are always changing and since cultural transmission, due to communications technologies is happening so fast today, it becomes a lot harder to predict things like how AI will be adopted around the world. There are many similarities in human cultures and that may help us find the common ground around how we adopt digital technologies and form rituals around them.