Online a Lot of the Time

Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign. Ken Hillis . Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2009 . 316 pp . Ken Hillis has written an engaging philosophical exploration of the dilemmas confronting Euro-Americans when they begin to use online communication. He is intellectually generous to anthropologists and their conceptual impulses, exploring a series of questions that can aid ethnographers interrogating Euro-American media ideologies surrounding new media. Hillis begins by asking how rituals in virtual space function to provide much-longed-for order in contexts when everything is in flux. He suggests that people use familiar techniques, such as ritual practices, to create predictability, especially when faced with newness. Yet when the new context is virtual, all sorts of widespread beliefs that underpin ritual practices are challenged and must be thought through in innovative ways. Hillis focuses in particular on commonly held Euro-American beliefs about how material objects and desire intermix (i.e., fetishes) and commonly held Euro-American beliefs about how signs point to reality (i.e., theories of representation). In turning to ritual as his starting point, Hillis argues that people everywhere are faced with the existential challenge of helping to "stave off the Void and the meaninglessness of existence it portends" (p. 71) through signifying performances that produce contingent but stable enough order. He suggests various practices that function as ritual ordering on the web (although anthropologists might wish for far more detail about these practices): memorializing the dead, church services involving avatars, virtual quests, and so on. These virtual rituals resemble offline rituals, especially in the ways that they function as naturalized ideologies. Both virtual and offline rituals contain logics that structure participants' experiences but are not necessarily part of their daily awareness. Users may not understand the algorithms that shape an eBay auction, yet the auctions still function as effective ritual ordering. For Hillis, this becomes an essential component of how all these online rituals serve to affirm neoliberal subjectivities, encouraging affective and exchange relationships that serve to reinscribe neoliberal logics whether or not the users themselves wish to do so. He is critiquing the ways in which information machines, with their neoliberal assumptions, are increasingly becoming central to how people imagine rituals should take place. For example, virtual rituals encourage the desirability of a particular flexibility, in which one can conceive of oneself "as an image flexible enough to be located in multiple locations different from one's embodied location" (p. 72). Hillis discusses how this flexibility, coupled with a commodified form of self-presentation on the web, ends up encouraging users to adopt neoliberal perspectives. In short, Hillis argues that the naturalized ideologies of the internet shaping the rituals analyzed in the book are neoliberal, and his larger task is contributing to a critique of the role information machines play throughout the Internet in encouraging neoliberal practices and ideas. Given that neoliberal ideologies are his target, Hillis not surprisingly turns to fetishism online as the next conceptual knot to untangle. He argues that our own philosophical traditions about fetishism turn an object's virtuality into a conundrum for scholars that it is not for users. He summarizes the long theoretical tradition that discusses how central materiality is to the objects that are fetishized. It is not only materiality, of course, but also the ways in which fetishism hinges on how objects are located in space, and located vis-à-vis other embodied objects. Hillis begins to unravel these assumptions by pointing out that space exists through contrast under virtual conditions just as much as it does in offline situations. He then goes on that virtual interactions depend on a dichotomy that presupposes offline experiences, that the virtual is compelling primarily because there is a dual component to the animation-there is someone offline using avatars or words to interact with others who also presumably have an offline anchor; "the belief that the Web constitutes a relational space fosters a belief in the ability to transmit a fragment of the self 'elsewhere' into virtual space where, as a sign/body, one will be experienced by oneself and others as having something of the qualities of an object-person coupled to those of a fetish-index" (p. 101). Hillis suggests that the well-theorized dual aspects of fetishism continue to function in virtual worlds, regardless of whether the object-person is material or virtual. Hillis argues that the "newness" of new media does not necessarily require new theoretical tools but, rather, an understanding of the contradictions within Euro-American philosophical theories of representation and materiality. In the last part of the book, Hillis explores how gay men use webcams to engage with the paradoxes created by fetishism coupled with widespread homophobia. Why gay men? Both privileged as men and stigmatized as queer, gay men were early adaptors of a technology that allowed them to be, in their own minds, both public and private about their sexuality and have a modicum of control over their fetishization. He points out how economically difficult being an early adaptor (and, thus, early adapter) of web-cams turns out to be. This was a serious, and often unsustainable, financial commitment as well as an aesthetic commitment on the part of these gay men. In addition, Hillis suggests that gay men have parts of their own ambivalent social status confirmed by the mechanics of virtual presence spatially. Virtually, as Hillis argues at numerous points in the book, one is always both online and embodied, virtual presence always involves a representational anchor elsewhere. Gay men face a similar situation temporally: denied full acknowledgment in the present moment, they orient toward a possible future of acceptance, of being fully acknowledged as present, always here and not here, now and not now. Lastly, gay men struggle with how their telefetish is always commodified. According to Hillis, in these instances, they are actively volunteering to be fetishized, which is both affirming and disquieting in equal measure. Hillis suggests that over time, this tension is unsustainable, and many gay men only volunteer to be fetishized for a certain period and then quit. Online a Lot of the Time asks significant philosophical questions about how our theoretical traditions are challenged by online communication. Ethnographers may prefer concrete examples in which the nuances of the material are carefully explored. This book points the way to some ethnographic places to begin answering these very Euro-American questions

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