preferred to participating in religious rituals (as evident when games compete with church services on Sundays). Games are natural rituals insofar as they unconsciously or nondeliberately bring about the ingredients for a successful ritual. But they are scheduled, predictable, and contrived (using a ritual technology to generate what might be considered an artificial ritual experience), and they bring together a community that has no other coherence, and no other purpose, than the experience of the peaks of ritual emotion itself.
The mechanism operates in the case of other forms of entertainment. Attending a concert has little advantage over listening to recordings as far as hearing the music is concerned; generally one hears it best on recordings. It is the experience of belonging to a focused crowd that provides the lure of a popular entertainment group; all the more so if the entertainers already have the status of being a sacred object, giving fans the additional excitement of being close to them – even if it is hundreds of feet away in a big arena. The main experience of the pop concert is the mood of the other fans; this is a textbook case of mutual buildup of emotion through bodily feedback in all its modalities. The same applies to a classical music performance, although the mood is more sedate, in keeping with the difference in social-class tone and atmosphere. Here, too, it is the experience of being at a special event – the hush of attention before the orchestra starts, the collective focus on the musicians – that makes the experience at the opera or the symphony a more significant experience than listening to the same music privately at home. This is not simply a matter of being seen by other people at a high-culture event – since under contemporary conditions these crowds are typically anonymous, in contrast to the more enclosed high-status communities in previous centuries who recognized each other at the opera – but comes from the subjective feelings of the ritual experience. The hypothesis is that participants have a stronger identification as persons attached to high culture if the crowd has been enthusiastic in response to the performance, than when the collective response is weaker; and that the effect of ritual intensity is stronger than the effect of being recognized by other people.
Televised and radio-broadcast concerts have such effects only weakly. The same holds for political and religious gatherings. Politicians’ campaign speeches, nominating conventions, and important official addresses are televised and can be experienced at a distance. Nevertheless, persons who are strong partisans want to be physically present, confirming a reciprocal relation between identity and physical presence. The hypothesis is that attending political events in person increases partisanship, to the extent that the speech is a “good one” – in other words, that it involves the interplay of speaker and crowd that builds up shared enthusiasm; and reciprocally, those persons who already have an identification with the political leader or faction have a stronger desire to take part. The running off of these repetitive relationships is a self-reinforcing IR chain.
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Religious services, like other collective experience of ritual, vary in their intensity. Distance media can provide some of the sense of shared attention and emotion, which give a feeling of attraction, membership, and respect. The strongest effects are reserved, however, for full bodily assembly. Conversion experiences – coming forward to be born again, or otherwise committing oneself to a life of religious dedication – happen primarily at big evangelical meetings (Johnson 1971). Personal presence in a crowd, worked up collectively to a strong shared emotion, gives the impetus for reshaping one’s identity. The downside of religious conversion confirms the pattern as well. A considerable proportion of persons who are born again drop out of religious participation within a year; many persons are born again numerous times (Bromley 1988; Richardson 1978). It is the big, intense religious gatherings that bring forth the emotion and the shift in membership attachment; as one settles back into the routine of smaller and less collectively emotional church services, and then drifts away from attending, the identification and the emotional energy also fade.
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On the whole, it appears that large-scale, relatively formal rituals come off better by remote communication than do small-scale natural rituals. This seems to be so because large-scale rituals are working with established symbols, already built up through previous iteration of an IR chain. Relatively impersonal rituals convey membership in large groups, only part of which ever assembles in one place; and thus distance communication gives a sense of something large that one belongs to. But this is effective only if there is at least intermittent personal contact with some other members, worshipers of the same symbols. And the remote broadcast must convey the audience’s participation, not merely its leaders or performers.
How then do we assess recent forms of communication, including email and the Internet? For the most part, these lack the flow of interaction in real time; even if electronic communications happen within minutes, this is not the rhythm of immediate vocal participation, which as we shall see, is honed to tenths of seconds. There is little or no buildup of focus of attention in reading an email, no paralinguistic background signals of mutual engrossment. A written message may attempt to describe an emotion, or to cause one; but it seems rare that email is used for this purpose. A hypothesis is that the closer the flow of emails is to real conversational exchange, the more possibility of a sense of collective entrainment, as in a rapid exchange of emails in a period of minutes or seconds. But even here it is dubious that strong feelings of solidarity can be built up, or the charging up of a symbol with collective significance.
Solidarity prolonged and stored in symbols
High levels of emotional entrainment – collective effervescence – are ephemeral. How long will the solidarity and the emotional mood last? This depends on the transformation of short-term emotions into long-term emotions, which is to say, the extent to which they are stored in symbols that reinvoke them. Symbols, in turn, differ as to what kind of group solidarity they invoke, and thus what symbolic / emotional memories or meanings will do in affecting group interactions, and personal identities, in future situations.
Consider a range of situations where collective emotion is generated. At the lowest level are situations where a number of people are assembled, but with a very low focus of attention. Such would be people in a public waiting place like an airport departure lounge, or a queue lined up for tickets. Here there is little common mood, possibly even impatience and annoyance because the focus of different individuals and subclusters are at cross purposes. Nothing is prolonged from these situations except the fleeting desire to get it over with and get out of there.
At a higher intensity are situations with a buzz of excitement: being on a busy street in a city, in a crowded restaurant or bar. There is a palpable difference between being in an establishment where there are lots of people and one that is nearly empty. Unfocused crowds generate more tacit interaction than very sparse assemblies, and thus give a sense of social atmosphere. Even though there is no explicit interaction or focus of attention in such places, there is a form of social attraction to being there. Being in a crowd gives some sense of being “where the action is,” even if you personally are not part of any well-defined action; the lure of the “bright lights of the city” is not so much the visual illumination but the minimal excitement of being within a mass of human bodies. As Durkheim indicates, the first step toward building up the “electricity” of collective effervescence is the move from sparse to dense bodily assembly. But in this alone there is little sense of solidarity with a recognizable group, and nothing that can prolong a sense of identification. What is lacking are symbols by means of which one could identify who was there, and that could re-invoke a sense of membership upon seeing them at another occasion.
A somewhat higher level of solidarity becomes possible in crowds that are focused by acting as an audience. Here the momentary sense of solidarity may become quite strong, insofar as the crowd takes part in a collective action – clapping, cheering, booing. These momentarily shared events, as we have seen, involve considerable micro-temporal coordination, a condition of collective entrainment that has very strong boundaries, intensely palpable when they are violated: one feels embarrassed when clapping
