Rituals, Semantics and Our Interconnected World

It’s hard to know where we stand at times, and with our rapidly changing world, many roles are also undergoing change, along with the rituals and symbols attached to them. Part of this change is connected to us now being connected.

At times I have wondered at some of the interchanges via text, Facebook or Twitter. Often these consist of one, two or three words, comments without content. For some time I mistakenly believed that communication without content was pointless. However, it seems that content informs only a small portion of communication. We are amused by the constant honking of a flock of geese, thinking them stupid creatures, unable to add content to their sounds. In actuality, content isn’t intended or useful. These are calls and responses that serve to keep the flock together and connected, working as a group. They don’t have to give each other complex explanations.

The same is true with people. Two people can sit down together and converse in depth. However, take a large crowd, and you’ll hear little depth and not much real content. Much social communication consists of prefab phrases: Hi; how are things; what’s up; how about those Niners; how’s the job; let’s grab a drink; lookin’ good; did you see the gas prices. It’s all semantic glue that holds the group together.

Back in those tribal days your peers were around you pretty much all the time. You interacted with the whole tribe almost daily, and your peer group, be in warrior, youth, elder or neighbor, were in almost constant contact, giving you the necessary social reinforcement. Today, our tribes are diverse and scattered. Children arrive at school on busses from far flung neighborhoods, and then they move away to scattered universities or distant jobs. We find ourselves immersed in a sea of strangers, and we honk, but no one honks back. We evolved as highly social creatures, and we aren’t comfortable without our group connection.

Enter cell phones, email, social media and the rest. Now we have our virtual peer group, even if one member is at Harvard and the other is on a fishing boat in Canada. These quick comments and short responses are the meaningless social chatter that would otherwise be held in the school playground or at a party. But “meaningless” probably isn’t the right term. They have a meaning that is fundamental to social animals like us; they mean that we are connected to our group and that our roles in our groups are recognized and reinforced.

And we do have so many groups, so many roles. We talk of the complex web of social interactions, perhaps the world wide web or some other web. I think that might be the wrong analogy. Rather than webs, we seem to have a vast system of Venn diagrams. We each inhabit dozens of social circles, and these overlap with dozens of other circles that in turn overlap with dozens more. If we obsess about being connected, perhaps it’s because it can be almost a full time job keeping up with this ever expanding complex of circles.

So, in the end, what’s the purpose of the foregoing words?  We expect that when something is written, it expresses a problem and offers a solution. Human nature may or may not be a problem, but it certainly doesn’t have a solution. My purpose here, given the sometimes troublesome misunderstandings between people whose Venn Diagrams don’t intersect, is to remind people that the complex and often seemingly irrational rituals, symbols and semantic interactions do make sense in some way or another, and that these people are acting out their own roles. Also, it’s good to remind ourselves to look at those rituals that we take as important and realize where they came from at that they are important, even sacred, only in a certain context, and if someone forgets to wash his feet, it isn’t the end of the world.