OWS= Hypertext

I've been thinking a lot about text and its relationship to communal self-analysis in artistic performance, political and social performance (such as civil disobedience), and rituals. In my view, coordinated civil disobedience is a more effective way of achieving self-analysis in a community than, say, rioting. The Bedford Glossary notes that images can be interpreted as texts if the material is isolated for analysis. Similarly, the performance of civil disobedience or other political actions often are set apart precisely for the sake of analysis. In my opinion, rituals are the most important candidate for being given provisional text status not only because they pervade our history yet are lacking today, but also because they are participatory.

In thinking about these things, I googled "civil disobedience ritual" and found a call for academic submissions to some ritual studies department that asked specifically for papers related to Occupy Wall Street. I am completely enthralled by the potential for ritual-esque practices being revived within communities across the country and around the world because they offer, like OWS, the potential for communal self-analysis. So the future of rituals will provide a way of framing a community so that it may be analyzed. The frame may be a physical, participatory gathering, and if it is (I hope it will be so), the result will very much resemble a hypertext.

Consider OWS. Everyone in the NYC Zuccotti Park, for the most part, held their own sign or had their own thing to say.  One who entered the park then had access to all of these blurbs or quotations and could talk to virtually anyone they wanted. OWS then operates both in the realm of hypertext as written word and as spoken word. Thus hypertext was achieved through assembly.