online a lot of the time: ritual, fetish, sign
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Tasmania]On: 27 November 2014, At: 22:06Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Continuum: Journal of Media & CulturalStudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20
Online a lot of the time: Ritual, fetish,signDavid W. Hill aa University of York , E-mail: © 2010, David W. HillPublished online: 26 Mar 2010.
To cite this article: David W. Hill (2010) Online a lot of the time: Ritual, fetish, sign, Continuum:Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24:2, 335-337
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304310903576374
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investigates in California’s prisons, have no choice, and have no choice but to reframe
their sense of self.
On the question of affect, Christopher Cordner neatly aligns waiting, love and the
ethics of encounter by saying that waiting is linked with attention, as in the French,
attendre:
If I am really to attend to what you say, or just to you, I must wait for what will come from you,not pre-empt it by thinking I already know what it will be, assimilating it into expectations orcategories I bring to the occasion. But then I must also wait on it when it comes, be present andopen to it, letting it work upon me. (169)
So, contra Tina Turner, love does have something to do with it, with waiting. Some of
these writers know what love is, while others work on the social, global political and
cosmic dimensions of the concept. It is a capacious and perhaps inexhaustible concept.
If I had been part of the team, I would have done a mini-ethnography with the concept.
I would have done ‘waiting for the click’, an investigation of group posing for
photographs. I thought of this because of a sketch in the final The Chaser’s War on
Everything, a TV social satire show. The team is down at Circular Quay soliciting passers-
by to take their cameras and photograph a group posing in front of the Opera House. It is
quite a large group, with quite a few cameras to record the event. So the exercise is testing
the patience of the victim to see just how many photos they will take before refusing to
take more. One gentleman takes an amazing 40 plus photos before the medium evolves to
a cine camera, and then paints and canvas (‘I can’t paint!’ he protests, but gives it a go
anyway).
So I would be interested, in photos with family and friends, in the precise timing of
‘waiting for the click’ when things are said to urge people to smile, when the smile
becomes frozen, when others break the rules, when the sociality of the group moves from
normal mobility to intimate formation and then back to fluidity, when they project
themselves into a future which will become memory. That is just to illustrate that such an
interesting word, waiting, a progressive verb, you’ll notice, rather than a noun, has become
productive of very fascinating work, and can keep ideas on the move.
Stephen Muecke
University of New South Wales
E-mail: [email protected]
q 2010, Stephen Muecke
Online a lot of the time: Ritual, fetish, sign, by Ken Hillis, Durham and London,
Duke University Press, 2009, 316 pp., US$23.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8223-4448-3
In Online a Lot of the Time Ken Hillis gives an expert account of online relations in
general and the relation of user (or participant, in Hillis’ terms) to avatar in particular.
The book is organized in two parts, the first addressing the subjects of the subtitle – ritual,
fetish, sign – and the second comprising two case studies. Hillis intends for the latter part
to stand alone, such that the reader is welcome to jump ahead and miss out what are rather
difficult theoretical discussions in the former part. This is indeed the case, and readers of a
more empirical bent will find that the two case studies (chapters 4 and 5) make perfect
sense in isolation. However, the preceding three chapters will reward those who can persist
through some rather dense sociological and philosophical exposition and argumentation.
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After a lengthy introductory chapter – one that perfectly sets the scene and, with a
little revision, would stand on its own as an excellent article of Hillis’ thought – the first
chapter addresses issues of ritual. Hillis surveys the work of Emile Durkheim and various
reactions to this influential work, before examining MUVE (Multi-user Virtual
Environment) interactions – such as wedding ceremonies in Second Life – as ritualized
storytelling. He offers an interesting insight on Web rituals, arguing that they are an
expression of the individual’s need for flexible tradition; that is, in an unstable, fluid world
people desire to be rooted in tradition but these very conditions – instability and flux –
necessitate flexibility. Hence rituals retain the hallmarks of tradition but become
‘placeless’, facilitating the tele-involvement of geographically distant individuals.
The second chapter gives a history of the fetish, taking in the key works of Karl Marx,
Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Hillis then gives an account of how the means of
communication have become fetishized, with ‘communicability becom[ing] an end goal, a
telos, a fetish in itself’ (92). Most interesting here is the discussion of how webcamming
homosexual men engage in telefetishism, fetishizing the image of the webcam user – a
subsection that also adds a political urgency to Hillis’ project by exploring these ‘sites’ of
visibility for such often unseen cultures and social groups (93–9).
The final chapter of the first section is perhaps the most intellectually stimulating –
and challenging. Hillis draws on Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy of the index to argue
that the avatar is ‘a networked signifier’ that would ‘point back to’ the user/participant,
‘extend[ing] them in virtual space’ (109). As such, and updating Peirce’s terminology to
that of Jacques Derrida, Hillis argues that the avatar bears a trace of the person that ‘stands
behind’ them (so to speak) whilst not bearing a strict relation of identity to that person.
Hillis concludes the book with two case studies in the two final chapters comprising the
second section. The first (chapter 4) examines MUVEs, offering a genealogy of graphical
chat – with Hillis observing that such a genealogy is often deliberately obscured by
developers to promote the newness of Web 2.0 and hence its separateness from Web 1.0
(143) – and an articulation of the avatar as a ‘middle ground’ (161) similar in kind to the
middle voice of literature. The second case study, returning to the focus of homosexual
men, examines personal webcam sites (chapter 5). These case studies give Hillis the
opportunity to test out the theoretical work in the three chapters of the previous section.
Throughout the book, but in particular in the long introductory chapter and again at the
end of the chapter on fetish (27–9 and 99–102), Hillis is at pains to point out that the
Internet is not a space (as in cyberspace). On this point he is certainly correct but I cannot
help but wonder if he is knocking on an open door. He emphasizes applications such as
Myspace that seem to perpetuate the Internet-as-cyberspace misconception – but then we
also have Facebook, which would seem not to. Is the average user – as opposed to the
minority user Hillis concerns himself with, who ‘immerses’ him/herself in online
‘environments’ (such as Second Life) – really guilty of this misconception? Assuming
I am an average user, then an average day involves reading journals online (you, the
reader, may well be reading this review online); checking emails; reading online
newspapers/comics; watching television programmes on demand; and engaging in IM
(Instant Messaging) chat: does any of this everyday use really suggest a conception of the
Internet beyond the surface level of the screen interface? Of course, many theorists did
understand the Internet in spatial terms, following science fictions such as William
Gibson’s excellent Neuromancer; but today this has largely given way to an understanding
of the Internet not as ‘other space’ but as a network that intersects with ‘real’ space – and
so ‘cyberspace’ gives way to terms such as ‘networked city’.
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Another concern is derived from Hillis’ account of the identity conditions between
user/participant and their avatar (11–18 and 103–32). Hillis explains well how the user
comes to identify with their avatar, seeing it as an extension of her/himself – a bodily
appendage and/or psychic extension – rather than as a representation. As such the avatar is
understood by the user as linked to but not identical to him/herself – bearing a trace of the
user, or pointing back to the user, but not itself the user. This undoubtedly provides a
useful account of the nature of the avatar but it seems to pose a problem for encounters
between users mediated by avatars. It is far from clear that this operation – seeing a trace
of oneself in one’s avatar – can work in reverse and so be extended to others, that is, it is
questionable whether it is possible to encounter the other through their trace (avatar).
Epistemologically, one would require something like a Turing Test or CAPTCHA
verification (a kind of challenge-response puzzle that computers cannot solve) to ever
know for sure that there is another person ‘behind’ or pointed to by the avatar. Perhaps this
is churlish. Phenomenologically, however, it is unclear whether this trace or pointing
backwards constitutes an encounter with the other – or just with their avatar. This is one of
the clearest accounts of the nature of the avatar I have read but more work needs to be done
on this. As it stands, the other appears to remain hidden and so all sorts of problems emerge
relating to the nature of the ethical encounter or the social bond online.
Such philosophical musing about new media is indicative of the lines of flight that this
rich text makes available. As a trans-disciplinary work it will be a valuable resource for
those working in a wide range of fields, such as media theory, cultural studies, sociology
and philosophy. At all times Hillis avoids the uncritical ‘global villagism’ of the virtual
life televangelists, adopting always a critical and scholarly approach. At times difficult, it
is nonetheless always an interesting, provocative and insightful read. This is a fascinating
account of life online.
A final reflection on what was my first impression: the cover art of the paperback
edition of this book is a series of webcam snapshots of a young woman, presumably at her
desk. I find them utterly bewitching, perhaps only because they are webcam images – a
series of standard photographs would not have the same contextual meaning. But whilst
distracted by the cover I almost lost sight of the fact that this book has as a main case study
and uniting reference point the experience of homosexual men online. The images
perfectly convey Hillis’ notion of the fetishization of the webcam user – but in this case it
seems to me to be the wrong user.
David W. Hill
University of York
E-mail: [email protected]
q 2010, David W. Hill
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