In general ritualized practice is a fertile paradigm for the future of socially situated immersive computing. https://twitter.com/mathpunk/status/1265058096432525312

Almost exactly a year ago I was musing on Twitter about ritual or ceremonial practices as way of framing the shared expression of attention scaffolding. Springtime is when the crazies flock online, so I am well aware of how it looks but Ellison's paper emboldens me to run with it

To be clear I'm not talking about Aleister Crowley shit here (unless you're into that, because you can totally do that). I'm speaking in a far more abstract anthropological sense of practices that establish and contend with shared value systematically motivating shared attention

It seems to me ceremony is basis of all practice. It's just that most practices we would not call that, they are very organic and ad hoc versus very deliberate in the sense implied by ritual habits and practices. There's a range of highly intentional to highly playful in practice

I can't find it (was going to link it here) but there was this dystopian adtech concept where you stand up in front of your TV and hold up your arms and say "McDonalds" to move past the ad. Now obviously that's not what people want, and it's a good case against ad-monetized svcs

but if you consider what a protocol of overt human actions looks like, a "ceremony" in Ellis's sense, that's not a bad place to start in imagining the possible varieties of in situ development & enaction of shared scaffolding of attention that I'm gesturing toward in this thread.