Welcome - I Started This Blog To Promote My New Book

Brief Description of Book's Thesis

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 identity 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.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Review - N. Katherine Hayles

"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 online digital avatar occupies a 'middle ground,' analogous to the 'middle voice' produced through the novel's technique 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 Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary."

N. Katherine Hayles is a literary critic, particularly in the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is a Professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University.

Review - T. J. Zou, University of Arkansas

Many scholars have studied the age of the internet from a socioeconomic perspective, attributing the creation of a new economy to the internet's magic power. Others have written about the Internet as a tool that allows niche products to get global attention. Hillis (media studies and communication, Univ. of North Carolina) examines the internet sensation as a humanist. 

He frames his topics within a remarkable breadth of cultural, anthropological, and philosophical thought, drawing analogies between the primitive ritualistic forms of communication and the Web-enabled human connectivity and interaction through second-generation virtual environments such as Second Life and online chat assisted by Webcam. The virtual, remote, networked, and iconographic modes of modern communication constitute online communes created by "digitally assembled individuals."

In the first three chapters, Hillis offers elaborate discourses on rituals, fetishes, and signs. In chapters 4 and 5, the more significant parts of this work, he directs readers to an extensive review of multifunctional MUVEs (multiuser virtual environments) and personal Webcams, and he presents his concluding observations about the dialectics of an ontological theme--being in an online society. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- University of Arkansas.

Review - Denise Pires (New Media Research)

"It’s a must read for everyone interested in the field of virtuality. A book that has grabbed the fullest of my interest due to my own personal interest in the virtual phenomena of avatars, the rituals in play and the digital ‘body’. Which one? Online a Lot of the Time (2009), by Ken Hillis. A lot has been written about virtuality, avatars, webcam personas etc., but Hillis presents his arguments about the virtual phenomena in a very concise and outstanding way. Online a Lot of the Time (2009) deals with the virtual phenomena from a theoretical – and historicized – view. Hillis researches and theorizes the changes that have taken place when rituals were brought to web based settings. These theories are supported by clear studies of specific web based settings like the avatar-driven chat application of Second Life."

To read the entire review, go here...

Review - Jonathan Sterne

"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