|
|
KEN HILLIS Professor of Media and Technology Studies Department of Communication Studies University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * |
|
|
|
||
|
Home | Other Interests | Academic Interests | Online Articles | Teaching | Contact |
||
|
|
||
|
* Books |
* |
|
|
*
Online a Lot |
*
"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 avatar occupies a “middle ground,” analogous to the “middle voice” 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 HOW WE BECAME POST HUMAN Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics and 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
Duke University Press, 2009
*
A wedding ceremony in a Web-based virtual world. Online memorials commemorating the dead. A coffee klatch attended by persons hundreds of miles apart via Web-cameras. These are just a few of the ritual practices that have developed and are emerging in online settings. Such Web-based rituals depend on the merging of two modes of communication often held distinct by scholars: the use of a device or mechanism to transmit messages between people across space, and a ritual gathering of people in the same place for the performance of activities intended to generate, maintain, repair, and renew social relations In Online a Lot of the Time, I explore the stakes when rituals that would formerly have required participants together in one physical space are reformulated for the Web. In so doing, I develop a theory of how ritual, fetish, and signification translate to online environments and offer new forms of visual and spatial interaction. The online environments I examine reflect the dynamic contradictions at the core of identity and the ways these contradictions get signified. *
I analyse forms of ritual and fetishism made possible through second-generation virtual environments such as Second Life and the popular practice of using Webcameras to “lifecast” one’s life online twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Discussing how people create and identify with their electronic avatars, I show how the customs of virtual-world chat reinforce modern consumer-based subjectivities, allowing individuals to both identify with and distance themselves from their characters. My consideration of Webcam cultures links the ritual of exposing one’s life online to a politics of visibility. I argue that these new “rituals of transmission” are compelling because they provide a seemingly material trace of the actual person on the other side of the interface.
|
|
|
*
Everyday eBay:
*
Edited by
|
*
"A collection as rich, diverse and surprising as eBay itself, Everyday eBay brings together a great group of scholars and eBayers to help us think through what eBay means. This collection will be required reading for anyone trying to make sense of this new virtual marketplace." *
"This book is a first, sorely needed attempt to learn from eBay, to understand it, and to situate it in the broader field of contemporary culture." *
"Everyday eBay represents a pivotal benchmark in the maturing field of new media studies." Routledge, 2006
Everyday eBay is the first scholarly analysis of eBay that examines how the site has become a global social, cultural, and economic phenomenon. The interdisciplinary essays in this volume approach eBay from a wide variety of perspectives, revealing how the auction site has become a bellwhether of taste and material culture, a research tool, a nexus for the increasingly uniquitous practice of selling and buying goods online, and a facilitator of global consumerism
|
|
|
*
Digital Sensations:
|
*
"Digital Sensations is the best critique of virtual reality's implications we now have. Rather than breathlessly celebrating the limitless digital future, Hillis carefully explores its continuities with certain earlier tendencies in Western culture and shows their common dangers." University of Minnesota Press, October 1999
To order call: 1-800-621-2736 or
Buy it Now! at Amazon.com Virtual reality is in the news and in the movies, on TV and in the air. Why is the technology--or the idea of the technology--so prevalent precisely now? What does it mean--what does it do--to us? Digital Sensations looks closely at the ways representational forms generated by communication technologies--especially digital/optical virtual technologies--affect the "lived" world. Virtual reality, or VR, is a technological reproduction of the process of perceiving the real; yet that process is "filtered" through the social realities and embedded cultural assumptions about human bodies, perception, and space held by the technology's creators. Through critical histories of the technology--of vision, light, space, and embodiment--Digital Sensations traces the various and often contradictory intellectual and metaphysical impulses behind the Western transcendental wish to achieve an ever more perfect copy of the real. Because virtual technologies are new, these histories also address the often unintended and underconsidered consequences--such as alienating new forms of surveilance and commodification--flowing from their rapid dissemination. Current and proposed virtual technologies refelct a Western desire to escape the body. Exploring topics from VR and other earlier visual technologies, Digital Sensations' penetrative perspective on the cultural power of place and space broadens our view of the interplay between social relations and technology. Digital Sensations is Volume 1 in University of Minnesota's series, Series Editors: Mark Poster, University of California at Irvine; Samuel Weber, UCLA; Katherine Hayles, UCLA.
Digital Sensations is published in Portuguese translation as:
|
|
|
* |
* Sensações digitais: Espaço, identidade e corporificações na realidade virtual* Editora Unisinos, São Leopoldo - RS - Brasil 2004 Click Here to view the Introduction and Chapter 1 of Sensações digitais
|
|
|
|
||
|
Home | Other Interests | Academic Interests | Online Articles | Teaching | Contact |
||
|
|
||
|
*
Copyright © 2009 by Ken Hillis |
* |
|
