1. Performing Media
  What is the role of rituals in modern societies and how are they related to electronic media? And what do children with media in their concrete peer-practice, especially with the still most famous medium, television? To get closer to some answers to these questions we have set up study-groups in a primary school in the inner city of Berlin, in which ten to twelve year old children learn to work with the video camera. The children were free to perform everything they wanted in front of the camera while they videotaped each other. During their work we videotaped the interactions between the children, so that we have a two-camera-perspective on the group. We discovered that most of them perform themes and forms they are familiar with by media.
  To give you an idea of the children´s performances in front of the camera and our interpretations of the performances we will start with a description of one short scene. The scene shows an advertisement for a product we know as deodorant spray that is presented by three boys in a quite ununsual way. Murat, the one in the foreground, shows the spray to the camera with the sentence: "This is perfume for the ass." From the other two boys, Binol and Wladimir, we see only their bottoms swinging in a shared rhythm from one side to the other. After Murat sniffs deeply at the deodorant, he sprays it at the bottoms of his friends and shouts the original product´s name "Roxanne" in the camera. The performers in the back swing their bottoms and sing "wobble, wobble" until the three boys jump forward and present their thumbs with arms extended.
  We will unfold our theme in four steps. The first one deals with the connection between media rituals and forms of different communities. The second one analyzes the relation between the performance of advertisements and advertisements in general. The very creation of the scene out of the context of the peer-group will be the theme of the third part. We will end with a short summary of our concept of media rituals in peer-practice.
2. Virtual vs. concrete communities
  We consider media-oriented acting in peer groups as a collective practice in which aesthetical and formal preconditions of media are mixed up with group actions. In our example the group of children uses the presentation form „advertising“ to stage their own topics and ways of self-presentation. Central aspects in this context are:
the significance of the performative - the corporeality, materiality and performing character of this kind of actions. The actors intentions can be seen more clearly in the dealing, bodily acting and demonstrating than in the things they say. In an overdrawn way this points out an important part of all social communication;
the ritual elements of styling, formalizing and repetition of media-oriented acting which produce solidarity and community. In our case the medial framework of „advertising“ with its implications of „product presentation, shortness, joke“ delivers a common ground. In the ritual repetition of „advertising“, from which all children know immediately what it is, they are enabled to present something together.
  There is at present a wide discussion about the production of community by media rituals in media research. This discussion focuses mostly on the influence of television. Television opens ritual spheres of experience separated from daily life where the TV viewers establish virtual communities limited by time. This happens by the use of telecasting design, serial organization, repeatable genres, the ritual production of society-wide events, the structuring of daily life and the cosmic-liturgic character of the TV programme.
  In this respect it seems problematical that media rituals are described as detached from concrete practices in social groups. They should produce only a secondary, potential ritualization, the relevance of which in the daily social interactions is not further evaluated. Our example demonstrates that media rituals can be found in group interactions outside the actual use of media as well. Our guiding thesis is that only common social practice in concrete groups and communities provides information about the importance of media rituals in the process of community construction.
3. Creative Transformations in Media Performances
  The second point we want to make is that the children get a possibility to work on their own themes by choosing the media framework as well as to perform and to transform the subject matter. The children may get in contact with new, interesting but maybe awkward themes during the media performance, but at the same time they are protected against personal exposure. In other words, the frame offers a possibility to work on themes and questions while at the same time it creates a distance between the performing children and the performed theme. In our media performances done by peers we notice important themes the children are working on in their pieces. These themes are realized not just in any context but in the form of classical media presentation as we saw in the advertisement video piece. Therefore we want to speak of a frame the TV offers. In this frame different the children work on the presented cultural canon and reshape it in their own way and with their own themes.
  The children in the scene transform an advertisement for deodorant spray into an advertisement for an as yet unknown product of, as they themselves call it, "Parfum für Arsch", "perfume for ass". They make use of a couple of the classical techniques of presentations in TV-advertisment e.g. the offering gesture of the talk master, and combine them with unclassical themes. First of all, there is the presenter, who is offering the product to the spectators. He demonstrates the way to use the product by spraying it at the moving backsides of the other two children. As third point worth noting is that in their performance the children are presenting a sort of community centered around the presented product that is in general connected with privacy and intimacy.
  But this kind of community centered around the product is transformed by some indexical information. The children do not just replay something they have seen on the television-screen, they make special use of the form of the advertisement to invent a new product for a part of the body they are very much interested in: the backside. They transfer the use of the product from the armpit to the backside and in doing so they also transfer the traditional meaning of the product. In their performance, they work out a more sexual interpretation of the product than the more usual hygienic one. Choosing the subject of the backsides, the children perform a more or less taboo topic and take the opportunity to work on their actual questions of sexuality, hygiene and obscenity. By making the backsides to a subject of discussion the kids are at least kidding with the way of product-presentations of adults. Not just subjected by the advertisement-ideology they show how they can play with content and form of advertisements. They are so familiar with advertisements, that they are able to take the mickey out of it.
4. Interaction and Aesthetics
  The third point we want to make is that the performances we find on video have been created within the interactions of the group of children. We will show, that not only verbal discourses are transmitted in the context of a group and create a sense of community but also or maybe the more movements and performances. We define performances as stylized actions that are performed for a potential audience. The analysis of our empirical material shows how individuals bring performances into the group, in which way they are taken up by others and which role they play in the advertisement composed by four children from the group. Our methodology that gives two different views on the peer-group allows us to draw a line between the interaction in the group and the performances „on stage“.
  The little video scene we have already described is based on two main performances picked up out of the groups activities. The first one is the use of the deodorant spray. Binol, who takes the spray out of the bag of one of his female school-mates, goes to the middle of the room so that everybody can see him and performs a more or less typical handling of the tool as long as some spectators are looking: he uses it at several places all over his body. The second performance involves the hip movement that Güley exercises several times before she presents it to her class-mate Maria. Maria is not interested but at the moment when Güley underlines the movement putting her hands on her hips, moving the hips very slowly from one side to the next, other children get attracted and pick up the perfomance, redirecting and playing with it. It is again Binol who also swings his hips while holding them with both his hands, and Wladimir, who is echoing the move with a somewhat ironical: "wobble, wobble!"
  To describe the phenomenon of passing on some figures of movement from one individual to the next, we speak of mimetic actions. What does this mean? Mimetic actions are bodily actions, in this case movements, that are connected to previous movements in a kind of aesthetic relation. In our case it is an imitation of something seen before that is performed again and presented by the group. But the children relate only to several performances while others are hardly noticed. So is Güleys hip performance picked up in the second and not in the first run and it is picked up by the boys after Güleys class-mate Maria refused to pay any attention. Analyzing the movements we find out that both figures that later on become part of the performance of an advertisement are stylized before in the interactions between the children. Acting in a stylized way may mark the children´s possibility to play with figures in an ironic distance. After playing with them in the context of the group they are ready to be transferred to the advertisement described beforehand.
  The scene is also interesting for us, because the boys are working on the theme of gender. Already in the first step when Binol just discovered the deodorant spray, Wladimir takes it over, plays with it and sings "I´m a girl". That the children do a performance of gender becomes even clearer when we reconsider the movement of the hips and the way it is passed over. Maria, who is explicitly adressed by this performance, refuses to pay attention to it while the boys take it up straight away. Their performance is marked by an ironical distance that makes it easier for them to play with the notions of gender presented in that particular movement.
5. Conclusion: Media-Rituals in Peer-Groups
  Media-related processes of ritualization are characterized by a tension between canonical, repeatable forms and actual elements derived from the situation of concrete groups. On the one hand children between childhood and youth find ritualized patterns to discuss interesting but problematic themes without the risk of blaming themselves. On the other media rituals constitute dynamic communities that use medial preconditions as fields of community construction. The medial preconditions are always related to the social practice and the state of the respective group.