Haunted Media

Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television

Professor of

Radio/Television/ Film at Northwestern University published in 2000 Jeffrey Sconce

Haunted Media

image

illusion/immersion

performance

the uncanny

haunted media

He killed the TV!

Central as well to the initial cultural fascination with telegraphy, telephony, and wireless, such liveness is at present the foundation for a whole new series of vivid fantasies involving cyberspace and virtual reality. At times this sense of liveness can imply that electronic media technologies are animate and perhaps even sentient. (2)

Under what social and historical circumstances did electronic media come to be seen as living and alive? How have ideas of an animating sentience in electronic telecommunications changed across history and media? How have metaphors of living electronic technology impacted cultural debates over telecommunications technology? [...] Why is it, after 150 years of electronic communication, we still so often ascribe mystical powers to what are ultimately very material technologies? (6)

The Telegraph

The rst ofcial telegraph message in the US May 24, 1844

For a world that had waited weeks to receive messages from across the ocean, and days to receive messages from across the nation, the ability to contact London from New York in only seconds must have truly tested the limits of credulity. (21)

The world, it has been said, will be made a great whispering gallery, wrote one telegraph enthusiast: I would rather say, a great assembly, where everyone will see and hear everyone else. The most remarkable effect, if I may judge from my own narrow thought, will be the approach to a practical unity of the human race; of which we have never yet had a foreshadowing, except in the gospel of Christ. (22)

Spiritualism

The Spiritual Telegraph

The Sisters Fox: They Talked to Dead People