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)

In Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign—a follow-up to his award-winning Digital Sensations (Minnesota, 1999)—Ken Hillis takes on the dangerous tasks of historicizing and theorizing the present. His book is a complex meditation on online rituals, significations, and media practices, in particular on the “traces 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 “sign/body” 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 image 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 “be 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 itself 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 online selves become more than mere representations of us.

Online is an intensely interdisciplinary work that spans a range of approaches and topics, including linguistics, media cognition, technological and cultural history, discursive analysis, public policy debates, media 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 media research. Because Hillis traces the deeply historical conceptual, philosophical, and theoretical roots of his “new” story, he accesses the continuities and discontinuities in media practice, technologies, and phenomena overlooked by much of the “new media” literature, which often reifies the new in uncritical ways. This places Hillis in contemporary conversations with those scholars who do critical new media 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). The experiment is a success in that each part stands alone, but the richer reading occurs when the book is read straight through as the chapters build telescopically. In his introduction, Hillis frames his work by engaging James Carey, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Guy Debord, but the book as a whole is a tour-de-force of theory greats, including Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Karl Marx, and Charles Sanders Peirce. This list indicates the breadth of scholarship readers can expect from this work, but it also indicates the book’s demand for intellectual fortitude, stamina, and familiarity with cultural theory terminology. Its style makes it a challenging read, but it is worth...