A New Year's Ritual: Endings & Beginnings

It's the end of class and the semester, but a new one will come soon. In the spirit of the new year, I thought I'd comment on a story on a story I saw on New Year's. (yeah, it's a little late--and I can't find the actual article anymore!)

It was about how people would bring in all their old junk that they wanted to get rid of—bills, bad grades, letters from exes—and burn them in Times Square. For people who didn't have anything physical with them, they were provided paper to write down the things they wanted to get rid of in the new year.

I find that neat, how we humans need these rituals to start anew. Our class is on the web, and we've talked about how the web is better at some things and traditional print is better at others—I think here is a great example of something you can't do electronically. I supposed you could erase your hard drive, but there's something about the physical act of crumpling or ripping or burning or smashing that is substantial. The physical act lends weight to the symbolic, making it all the more real.

I'm not advocating violence though! I just thought it was neat that in this century, we still have rituals like that, in the one of the busiest areas of the largest cities in the U.S. It's also interesting that it was a mass ritual—just as we are social animals and like to build relationships and communities, we also like to tear down things together. That's another thing that is sometimes harder to do online.

I remember a friend used to say that he preferred that we meet in person, then second came phone, then last, the internet. I didn't understand then, back in undergrad. I thought online was the best because I could multi-task. I understand now, that there's no replacing the real-time face-to-face contact. We'll always develop better technology and have convergence, but the physical, real sense of self and of the other will never be replaced.

--Hana