James Carey’s ritual view of communication left me great impression when I first learned in undergraduate class. This week, I revisited chapters from his book Communication as Culture, including “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” which connect with my project’s idea. Carey explains how communication creates and maintains shared meanings. He distinguishes this ritual perspective from a transmission view, which focuses on sending information across distances. Using newspaper reading as an example, he shows how an everyday media practice invites people to participate in a particular representation of the world. Readers encounter stories that organize social life into recognizable roles, conflicts, and values, helping sustain a shared understanding of society. In this account, ritual extends beyond religious ceremonies to ordinary practices through which people express and reaffirm shared beliefs. Carey also explains that the two perspectives can coexist: the same activity can provide information while maintaining a shared understanding of reality.
This chapter helps me clarify what I mean by ritual in my MA project. My interactive web-based experience would combine an AI agent, guided breathing, and an interactive magic performance, potentially incorporating eye-tracking or other physiological signals. I want to explore how participating in this sequence might shape the relationship a visitor develops with the system, the AI agent and the authority they attribute to it. Carey’s perspective encourages me to consider how the whole encounter establishes meaning: the opening question, the instructions, the visitor’s actions, and the final reveal could all contribute to how a computational output becomes believable or personally significant. I am especially interested in whether a temporary sense of trust can emerge while the system’s mechanisms remain unclear. However, an everyday media practice develops through repeated participation, whereas my project may involve only one brief encounter. This difference inspires me to investigate: which aspects of ritual can operate within a short interaction, and which depend on familiarity or repetition over time?
This week, I completed training modules covering HTML webpage building, eye-tracking setup, and understanding eye-tracking metrics. The HTML training helped me think about how to structure the web interface and organize the different stages of the experience. The eye-tracking training helped me consider what data might be available and how I could interpret it when designing the interaction. I still need to decide which measurements would meaningfully support the project’s research questions. I plan to meet with my potential committee members next week, so I do not yet have a committee meeting discussion to report. In those meetings, I hope to discuss the project’s scope, the role of the AI agent, and how to connect the creative experience with a manageable experimental design.
Reference
Carey, J. W. (2009). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society (Rev. ed.). Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Communication-as-Culture-Revised-Edition-Essays-on-Media-and-Society/Carey/p/book/9780415989763