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

[scott at scottmacleod.com]

I just added: Hillis, Ken. 2009. Online a Lot of The Time: Ritual, Fetish, 
Sign. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press to 
http://www.webnographers.org/index.php?title=Books as first webnography. 

Interesting books listed here. 

Best,
Scott 

http://scottmacleod.com 

 


Ken Hillis writes: 

> 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. 
> 
> ----------
> 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. 
> 
> 
> ---------
> 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
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