Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 112

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contests our workaday identities are briefly transcended, our
empirical worlds vicariously expanded, our "ontological thirst" for
more of reality answered.
Besides the narrative and imaging (mythic content) stressed by
Eliade, however, I think today we must also emphasize the process.
With hyp>ertext offering adults the chance to join the kids in reading
"choose your own ending" stories, with virtual reality giving both
kids and adults the highest technology to "make . . . believe" into
"almost reality," even formerly passive and solitary entertainment
has become interactive. Users who may not know their fleshly
neighbors' names become p>art of electronic network communities,
sharing thoughts and feelings in new varieties of conununion through
ritual. The older varieties of participant-communities continue to
thrive as well. Whether social elite attending museum and gallery
openings or home boys and girls rallying at sports events, we
participate in elaborate rituals, identifying ourselves not only with
the artist or team, but also with the group(s) whose meml^rship
(process, activity) we thus so actively share.
Traditionally, of course, religious believers were supposed to see
reality and define themselves prinurily in terms of their official
religious faith/institution; however, many archaic echoes might
sound in the secular aspects of their lives. But a century of
sociological studies have shown how, in Western Europe and America
at least (locus of the "general culture" to which 1 here refer), most
members of the official religions have in fact molded their faithinterpretations and ethics to fit the contours of their surrounding
culture and secular ways. The effect of this on American Pr