digital initiation rite (n.) Ritual sequence of biographical change comparable to an initiation rite, in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in part of the sequence.
The concept of digital initiation carries this ancient sequence of epistemic transformation into twenty-first century forms of mediation. While acknowledging two conditions that make each of these rites irreducibly singular—the individuation of social crisis, and the personalization of online experience—they possess a broad outline of events. Digital initiands experience some form of unsettling invisibility, relative to a nexus of relationships in which they are embedded, during which they immerse themselves in a series of audiovisual experiences online through which they learn to theorise it. At an unspecified point, these digital journeys transport them to new social actors who share similar theories of the world, and the forging of these new relationships also serves to reconstitute their existing ones, making a break with the past. Beyond any social choreography, a digital initiation rite is a complex process that dismantles van Gennep (and Turner’s) neat tripartite scheme.
Digital Initiation Rites (2025, p.11).
Vita Peacock 
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