I would like to start this new article in the series “Don Bosco, the digital and virtual reality”, by making some assumptions that are the basis of this article and the substance that sustains the ideas I will develop here. The motive is to explain why the human and cultural environment is essential for digital communication and how we can identify the concept of environment in Don Bosco’s educational system.
What is the internet? A cultural environment!
What are social media? A human habitat!
What makes the virtual world in the internet and social media keep moving? Human and cultural rituals!
Basically, what we do when navigating the internet and connecting to social media is to express human and cultural rituals.
What is the purpose here? I just want to open a window that allows us to broaden our view of the digital in the context of major technological transformations, maintaining that the internet and social media are all about environment, human relationships, group and community networking. To put it simply: we communicate based on our human and cultural rituals! Hence we need some concepts to start with.
Rituals have a social, cultural and religious meaning. It is important to consider that rituals are not only about religious rites like the baptism ritual in the Catholic Church.
Rituals have to do with the most basic human expressions like pronouncing a sequence of words, performing gestures, following habits like eating, sleeping, working, dressing and so on. We have rituals related to birth, and practically all societies have their way of celebrating weddings, sports victories, dance and music festivals, funerals.
People express their beliefs, values and rules through rituals. Anthropologists believe that rituals are important and provide valuable information about people, their culture, their history, their beliefs. Rituals are the concrete and material expression of people’s beliefs, ideas and feelings. Rituals are passed on from one generation to the next
Rituals are authentic and common ways of communicating. Through words, gestures, symbols, codes, sounds people communicate with each other, understand each other. For instance, when two football teams go to the stadium to play, the fans from the two teams use symbols and rituals to communicate with each other(flags, theme song, and so on).
This premise is fundamental to understanding that communication in all its dimensions – interpersonal, social, community, institutional, has as its central roots in the human person, and is embedded in human culture and rituals which reveal the strength and richness of humanity, intertwined with people and groups.
Moreover, this view of the digital from a broader notion of human beings and their cultural rituals helps us to avoid some dualism between the person and digital, physical reality and virtual reality, offline and online.
This broader view of virtualisation from an anthropological point of view offers us a broader way of interpreting our virtual real time and space, and what trigger us to use the internet all the time. However, we are not going to touch on this issue this time around.
I would just like to go back to the view of rituals, so as to apply it to the internet.
What, then,is the internet from the perspective of ritual? Personally, I think the internet is a vast network of human and cultural rituals; a human and cultural environment in which people live, in which they share their rituals. On the internet we find art, culinary inteests, politics, fashion, sport, music, film, shopping, relationships between people, information about everyday life, religious content, economics, love, life and death.
When we talk about fashion, food, music, games, we are talking about anthropological aspects, that is, how to understand people within their culture. When people use social media to talk about what is going on in war, politics, illness, taxes, gossip, music… they are expressing their feelings, thoughts, desire, imagination, attitude about what is going on in their own lives.
Therefore, I think we need to look at the Internet and social media as part of our lives, as an expression and extension of human rituals. I think that from these rituals, from these anthropological and cultural elements, we can better understand what is happening in the universe of communication and in the changing world.
Therefore, the internet is a wide world of human and cultural rituals!!
But you may ask: What about technology, bits and bytes, apps, internet protocols, optical fibre, satellites? Isn’t speed in the internet related to technology? What have human and cultural rituals to do with it?
Of course, technology has a fundamental role in the internet. We could say that technology is also part of culture, but I don’t want to enter into this complex issue. Basically we can state that human and cultural rituals are associated with technology. They are not in contrast! Human beings create technology. Technology is also associated with other inventions like electricity, telephone networking, arts.
Let’s simply say that what makes up the internet is human rituals, human relationships. Without it, the internet would be empty!!
Human beings make up the internet and social media. All the issues posted, discussed and shared in the internet have to do with human conditions and realities!
More recently, one of the research segments that is growing a lot in this area is digital ethnography and netnography. Researchers are trying to look at the internet and digital communication from the perspective of rituals. It means that internet and digital are not only about technology, but something more deep and meaningful.
Considering this vision of the internet as human and cultural networking, we can try to find a point of dialogue between the digital and Don Bosco’s view of our ritual environment.
As we have said previously, human and cultural rituals allow people to communicate with each other, express their ideas, feelings, create connections and carry out projects together. For example, education is an expression of rituals: going to school every day, studying a specific subject, respecting certain rules at school, following exam procedures, attending graduation, relationships with the teacher, with classmates, etc.
It is interesting that rituals usually involve the environment and other people. The environment is fundamental to the performance of the rituals. The ritual requires the other, creates relationships, creates participation, establishes affective bonds, creates a sense of belonging, allows people to express their freedom, feelings, words and values. Let's think for example of a marriage ceremony. In general, this celebration involves family and friends. Let's think about a religious or civil party: it requires an environment, symbols, music, a reason to celebrate, clothes, postures, etc.
The communication environment is very much made of human relationships! It is not only about a geographical place. It has to do with human relations. Like a family: it is the love between father and mother and their sons that makes the environment, it is about their sense of belonging and what bids them tgother as a family.
The environment is like a big mosaic. It is made up of various elements: physical space, specific rooms, people, activities, values, symbols, human relations.
Let us now try to look at Don Bosco and how he created a ritual environment that was very effective in educating young people.
What was the foundation of Don Bosco’s educational system? Various elements. For instance, he wanted a large area for his young people so they could run, talk, play and socialize with each other. Educators should always be present as friends in order to motivate, assist, create bonds of relationship. He created a kind of networking of relationships! He created an environment in which young people could express themselves through their human and cultural and religious rituals (language, music, sports, religion, friendship, work, studies).
This networking was simple, but rich in symbols (liturgy), sounds, music, drama, games, Christian symbols (Stations of the Cross, devotion to Mary, the Eucharist, etc.)
Of course, Don Bosco’s ritual environment involved studies to do, learning professional skills, getting food to eat, a place to sleep, to live, to love! All these things we could call human rituals! Human religious and cultural values, codes, symbols, language in order to communicate.
Knowing that rituals are intrinsically a part of human beings, Don Bosco used various artistic activities to create a sort of system of communication in order to allow the pupil to experience things by seeing (reading), listening (music), touching (games), tasting (eating food).
The Oratory is an environment made up of various elements, for example, the spaces, the rooms for study and learning skills, the church, the courtyard, paintings, the presence of educators among the young people, games, music.
For Don Bosco the environment is essential for education because it is the privileged place for the experience of human and Christian values, the place where human and cultural rituals are expressed.
In this environment Don Bosco cleverly introduced religion, affection, dialogue, the friendly presence of the educators among young people, the family atmosphere, God and the Blessed Virgin. We can say that the environment forms, educates and encourages communication.
The internet is an environment. The digital is a habitat. Communication in the digital environment is genuinely an expression of human and cultural rituals. This explains why human beings are connected daily through their smartphones on the internet to read news, publish videos, listen to music, watch films, chat on social networks, advertise, express what is part of human rituals.
Within this communicative universe of human and cultural rituals is the human person with its virtues and its vices. And we cannot ignore this. The internet is not a neutral, peaceful, uniform place. It also represents the reality of life, with its pains and hopes.
Humanizing the internet and evangelizing today on social networks means above all knowing and recognizing human nature and its rituals associated with social, cultural and religious aspects. In these environments, with an understanding of their cultural and ritual reality we can dialogue with people so that they can, from their cultural and ritual place, promote justice, respect, dialogue, peace and fraternity.
Don Bosco was an educator capable of understanding his time, and by understanding the human, cultural and ritual reality, he knew how to dialogue with his young people and present to them, in their environment, the importance of educating for life, for others and for God.
