[ecrea] new book: Online A Lot Of The Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign

> 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 Second Life. Online memorials commemorating 
> the dead. A coffee klatch attended by persons hundreds of miles 
> apart via Web-cameras. These are 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 analyze 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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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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