Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign

Ken Hillis is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of "Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality" and a co-editor of "Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire."

"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 "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