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.
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.
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
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment