Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign (review)

After spending a couple of hours online, how do you feel? Not so good? Me neither. It’s not just the sitting or the staring or the clicking. The web leaves me feeling both paranoid and pathetic. What if Google, the self-proclaimed white hat of the web, is mapping my surf, much to the delight of future suspicious employers or rapacious divorce attorneys? And why the devil am I not outside working on my backhand? Lord knows it needs some help. Or I could be hanging with my mates down at the club, tippling a grappa and yelling at a soccer match on the telly.

The internet is, in the end, a rather sad place. It is a place for people without a place where they can be known by sight and smell. It is a place for people in search of the identity and meaning that belonging brings. Online a Lot of the Time is a book about those people and their existential cargo cult of cyberspace.

Marshall McLuhan referred to media as “extensions of man.” For the sage of Toronto, media were tools that allow you to transcend time and space, to be here and there, now and then. Just as McLuhan was influenced by the work of another great Canadian communications scholar, Harold Innis (The Fur Trade in Canada [1930]), the two of them greatly impressed James W. Carey, the man whose seminal essay on ritual, symbol, and transmission is the theoretical linchpin of this work.

Innis zeroed in on how technology and narratives about technology do ideological work for empire builders. Via Carey, Hillis revamps this point. “To varying degrees, networked individuals fetishize not only information machines as the economic and social actualization of the progress myth,” he writes, “but also an experience that such machines support—of the post-representational trace, transmitted to them in the form of an indexical sign/body, of geographically distant individuals who pique their interest for any number of reasons” (p. 15).

Hillis briefly discusses the Church of Fools, a “site” launched by the United Kingdom Methodist Church. The virtual church allows an individual to experience an extended spiritual charge—while you’re working, your avatar is praying. But the avatar is not you, Hillis argues, it is always a representation, infused with an existential investment that transforms it into a fetish. I wish that Hillis had spent more time exploring other virtual churches and, perhaps even more importantly, the networking of online hives that feed into physical megachurches such as Rick Warren’s famous Saddleback Church. After all, Hillis suggests that people turn to the web for community because they spend so much time commuting in the barren wilds of exurbia, the very fertile hunting ground for on-the-make pastors.

But if web dwellers crave community, it is often community in gutless anonymity. Too many people on the web don’t own what they say or do. They want to leave a trace but without the responsibility of authorship. Ultimately, Hillis is writing about a strange breed of celebrity. The web hails (troubled?) individuals to “perform themselves into public media” and create a microniche market for that performance. Hillis offers a case study on gay webcam performance as a form of consumerism in which “fans” fetishize both the delivery system and the performer. Making yourself into a “telefetish” is a form of power—conquering your fragile self-image to become a desirable albeit unknowable object for another—but to what end?

In traditional anthropological theory, rituals are often rites of passage or collective opportunities to explore, as Victor Turner would say, the what if of a culture turned upside down, if only for a few days. Festivals like Carnival allow individuals to escape their place in a social structure, and in the process catch a glimpse of how to challenge that hegemony when its order is restored on Ash Wednesday. Hillis argues that rituals...