[Air-L] Online A Lot Of The Time...

[Ken Hillis]

For those who might be interested, here are a few details about my new 
book, Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign. thanks, Ken H.

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Online a Lot of The Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign

Ken Hillis

Duke University Press, 2009 (May 15)
336 Pages, 10 illustrations
paper, 978-0-8223-4448-3, $23.95/14.99
cloth, 978-0-8223-4434-6, $84.95/59.00

A wedding ceremony in a Web-based virtual world. Online memorials 
commemorating the dead. A coffee klatch attended by persons hundreds of 
miles apart via Web-cameras. These are just a few of the ritual practices 
that have developed and are emerging in online settings. Such Web-based 
rituals depend on the merging of two modes of communication often held 
distinct by scholars: the use of a device or mechanism to transmit 
messages between people across space, and a ritual gathering of people in 
the same place for the performance of activities intended to generate, 
maintain, repair, and renew social relations In Online a Lot of the Time, 
I explore the stakes when rituals that would formerly have required 
participants together in one physical space are reformulated for the Web. 
In so doing, I develop a theory of how ritual, fetish, and signification 
translate to online environments and offer new forms of visual and spatial 
interaction. The online environments I examine reflect the dynamic 
contradictions at the core of contemporary identity making and the ways 
these contradictions get signified.

I analyse forms of ritual and fetishism made possible through 
second-generation virtual environments such as Second Life and the popular 
practice of using webcameras to "lifecast" one's life online twenty-four 
hours a day, seven days a week. Discussing how people create and identify 
with their electronic avatars, I show how the customs of virtual-world 
chat reinforce modern consumer-based subjectivities, allowing individuals 
to both identify with and distance themselves from their characters. My 
consideration of Webcam cultures links the ritual of exposing one's life 
online to a politics of visibility. I argue that these new "rituals of 
transmission" are compelling because they provide a seemingly material 
trace of the actual person on the other side of the interface.

>From the Back Cover

"Online a Lot of the Time tackles the complex subject of telepresence more 
convincingly than anything else around. It suggests that the sign/body of 
an avatar occupies a "middle ground," analogous to the "middle voice" of 
free indirect discourse, in which the avatar functions as more than an 
image but less than an autonomous agent. Moreover, because of the psychic 
investments that operators project into the avatar, it also functions 
analogously to a fetish--or rather, a telefetish. Building on previous 
theorizations of the fetish, the book makes a decisive intervention by 
showing that these concepts can fruitfully be extended into the virtual 
realm. With an impressive range of references, including commodity theory, 
media theory, the history of the telegraph, and a host of other areas, 
Online a Lot of the Time is essential reading for anyone interested in 
virtuality and its effects."
- N. Katherine Hayles, author of How We Became PostHuman: Virtual Bodies 
in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics and Electronic Literature: New 
Horizons for the Literary.


"In Online a Lot of the Time, Ken Hillis presents a new mode of describing 
so-called virtual phenomena such as avatars and webcam personas. He 
situates the 'reality' of online activity in the broader sphere of social 
experience and, in so doing, he neatly pulls the carpet out from under the 
'real' to which the 'virtual' is usually contrasted."
- Jonathan Sterne, author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound 
Reproduction.


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Ken Hillis
Associate Professor of Technology and Culture
Assistant Chair
Department of Communication Studies
Bingham 113, CB# 3285
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3285