Online A Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign by Ken Hillis, and: The Internet and American Business ed. by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi (review)

Abstract

ONLINE A LOT OF THE TIME: Ritual, Fetish, Sign. By Ken Hillis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2009.THE INTERNET AND AMERICAN BUSINESS. Edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2008.In Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign-a follow-up to his awardwinning Digital Sensations (Minnesota, 1999)-Ken Hillis takes on the dangerous tasks of historicizing and theorizing the present. His book is a complex meditation on rituals, significations, and practices, in particular on the of the referent[s] that work in and through avatars, webcam interactions, and multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) such as Second Life (13).Hillis coins and develops several significant concepts, in particular and telefetish. Sign/body describes online forms of signification mounted by Web participants that work to render the Web as both the realm of the and consciousness and that of space and movement, thereby to reconnect consciousness to the thing (13). Through this concept, Hillis suavely theorizes how semiotic exchanges between the real and the virtual unseat the division between the two. Closely related to the sign/body is his telefetish. Hillis argues networking technologies allow users to experienced phenomenologically as a telefetish both by others and by the individual himself or herself. He or she can fetishize the trace of others. Through the telefetish trope, Hillis notes the ways communication practice may actually gain autonomy from actual bodies, meaning the image can then be also imagined as a social relation in itself (17). Both of these terms help inject the function of desire into the literature-an important intervention. While Hillis does not imagine technology quite as self-guided or outside ourselves as Kevin Kelly, for example, Hillis walks the edge in theorizing what happens as our selves become more than mere representations of us.Online is an intensely interdisciplinary work that spans a range of approaches and topics, including linguistics, cognition, technological and cultural history, discursive analysis, public policy debates, uses and practices, philosophy and cultural theory. Any book that takes on this much risks overwhelming the reader. At points the central valence hazes in the face of complexity, but for the most part this book is expertly crafted. Hillis seamlessly interrupts a discussion about the productive power of convenience, flexibility, and neoliberalism with Renaissance history. Indeed, throughout he draws unconventional connections, making this work in many ways a model for the transhistorical yet theory-driven research. Because Hillis traces the deeply historical conceptual, philosophical, and theoretical roots of his story, he accesses the continuities and discontinuities in practice, technologies, and phenomena overlooked by much of the media literature, which often reifies the new in uncritical ways. This places Hillis in contemporary conversations with those scholars who do critical new studies exceptionally well, scholars such as Mark Andrejevic, Lisa Gitelman, Jeffrey Sconce, and Thomas Streeter. Unlike these writers, however, Hillis strangely slips between discussing the web as technology and as a set of meanings, and it is not always clear when he refers to which.The book's organization is, Hillis admits, a methods experiment that separates out theoretical investigations into ritual, fetish, and sign (part 1) and case studies on MUVEs and webcam sites (part 2) (42). …