Everyday Lives Ethnography Trial/Reflection #1: A new form of ritual?

I"m struck to see everyday life rituals of this British family unfold and be so similar to my own experience, some past, some present (http://twitter.com/EverydayLives). The rituals of shopping, eating together, catering to the children's taste, getting them to and from school, winning awards to encourage them to be creative and healthy, arriving home to enjoy some leisure time, elders beginning to plan for dinner, again catering to the children's preferences...and there they are! Chicken nuggets! In the past, when my son was seven he must have eaten a few thousand of these.

And to see the Webkinz computer game with the companion stuffed animals; Jake giving the animated animals a bath. This is so much like the games my son, now six years beyond his 7th birthday, used to play on his DS and PC. In Webkinz we see the vegetables wilting, in Zoo Tycoon the animals can die of hunger. A game can control behavior by appealing to feelings that we want to engender in our children, caring, responsibility.

I feel that I am seeing a new kind of ritual, one I have not been consciously aware of as a ritual but have been practicing. In the Tweets of the everyday life of this British family I see a set of rituals, distributed across time and place and owned by different groups, the marketers, the parents, the children. I see a complex interplay of rituals forming an uber ritual of consumption, with all strands of activity directed toward creating, selling, buying and consuming a leisure life experience. I see for the first time how rituals can be orchestrated outside of consciousness and direct observations, through very discreet actions, by parents and marketers and the children themselves, to create the leisure time cultural experience we are witnessing.

I would say this insight is a good pay off for spending one hour observing the life of this family, through Tweet, coming to us over the course of a day in their life.