The next grid blogging topic is Ritual, set to go off on Jan 15. I’m really excited about this one, and I expect to see some new blogs come out of the woodwork for it.

[grid::brand] was a good start, and there were some really interesting posts. But I did find that I was jumping from one blog I already read to another, and that the topics were a little confined to the obvious – the brand as “symbolic” of global capitalism, the debate over whether branding was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing (but this debate, however wrongheaded, is at least better than the straight-faced assumption that Brands are Evil). I’d have liked to have seen more people reflecting on their *own* “susceptibility” to branding, the uses of brands, or even actively branding something and talking about the process. In this vein, I really liked freegorifero’s reflections on whether grid blogging was a brand in itself. And I should of course mention that I was unforgivably slack about the whole thing.

With “ritual” though, we might see more religious bloggers, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnomusicologists, sub/clubculturalists, communication theorists, and Occult Investigators. Even better, we should see some contributions from all those literary and photographic types who are so adept at turning the little rituals of everyday life into poetry, or revealing the poetry in everyday life, take your pick. And what could be more ritualistic than the daily practice of blogging? Not to mention all the other rituals of digital and analog communication we engage in every day.

I won’t pre-empt things by getting too carried away, but I am really looking forward to this. And I will get to talk about the rituals of musicking, which, as I am (still) Writing Up My Thesis, is just about all I know anything about at the moment.