Ghosting: On Disappearance

by Dominic Pettman

Abandonment is as old as time, but ghosting is a modern twist on this ancient experience. It translates this age-old phenomenon into our modern world of screens, delete buttons and blocking options. Ghosting is not only an unpleasant experience, or cowardly act, but a symptom of our increasingly spectral – that is, mediated and virtual – relationship to the world. The overabundance of new modes of communication has invited an almost infinite number of contacts and conversations. At the same time, it has also offered an unprecedented opportunity for ignoring messages from others. And just as we invented the car crash when we invented automobiles, we also encouraged ghosting when we created the internet.

Ghosting creates an empty space in our a space faithfully tracing the silhouette of the one who ghosted us. But unlike traditional ghosts, today’s ghosters simply disappear, leaving behind a form of haunting that is closer to mourning for someone who is not in fact dead. In putting a kind of preemptive mourning into our everyday affairs, ghosting tells us much about the current human relationship – or non-relationship – to a shared sense of mortality, purpose, and spirit.   

This book – the first sustained analysis of ghosting – traces the source of this vexed experience to, and through, our current media ecology, technological networks, political landscape, collective psychology, romantic mantras, and deep sense of social neglect.

114 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 21, 2025

About the author

Dominic Pettman currently lives, works, learns and teaches in New York City. He is particularly interested in the ways in which "technology" influences our self-perceptions and cultural conversations.

Reviews

[Rob Sedgwick · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is 100% waffle about "ghosting" (the practice of unfriending someone). He looks at films, literature, and anything vaguely connected that he draws some analogy to. The basic idea is that we've been doing something similar to ghosting for centuries. I will be ghosting future books by this author (I know it's not the same, but nor are most of his things).

[Pádraig Mac Oscair · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most suspicious legacy of Mark Fisher's canonisation has been that "hauntological" has become the pseud's adjective of choice over the last decade, with little consideration of why a sense of absence is so important - or indeed, if it even applies in some cases. This explores the term as it applies to the abandonment of social and romantic relationships, but never engages or critiques the idea or motivation behind "ghosting" enough to read as more than a set of definitions and examples in search of a thesis

[Ahmed Gadalla · Rating 2 out of 5]

It doesn't say anything. Mix of anecdotes and ramblings. No thesis.

[Tracy Grenier · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not only did the actual book fall apart, I learned absolutely nothing new. This one is for the garbage heap.