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