Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television

Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power

by Jeffrey Sconce

In Haunted Media Jeffrey Sconce examines American culture’s persistent association of new electronic media—from the invention of the telegraph to the introduction of television and computers—with paranormal or spiritual phenomena. By offering a historical analysis of the relation between communication technologies, discourses of modernity, and metaphysical preoccupations, Sconce demonstrates how accounts of “electronic presence” have gradually changed over the decades from a fascination with the boundaries of space and time to a more generalized anxiety over the seeming sovereignty of technology.
Sconce focuses on five important cultural moments in the history of telecommunication from the mid-nineteenth century to the the advent of telegraphy; the arrival of wireless communication; radio’s transformation into network broadcasting; the introduction of television; and contemporary debates over computers, cyberspace, and virtual reality. In the process of examining the trajectory of these technological innovations, he discusses topics such as the rise of spiritualism as a utopian response to the electronic powers presented by telegraphy and how radio, in the twentieth century, came to be regarded as a way of connecting to a more atomized vision of the afterlife. Sconce also considers how an early preoccupation with extraterrestrial radio communications tranformed during the network era into more unsettling fantasies of mediated annihilation, culminating with Orson Welles’s legendary broadcast of War of the Worlds . Likewise, in his exploration of the early years of television, Sconce describes how programs such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits continued to feed the fantastical and increasingly paranoid public imagination of electronic media. Finally, Sconce discusses the rise of postmodern media criticism as yet another occult fiction of electronic presence, a mythology that continues to dominate contemporary debates over television, cyberspace, virtual reality, and the Internet.
As an engaging cultural history of telecommunications, Haunted Media will interest a wide range of readers including students and scholars of media, history, American studies, cultural studies, and literary and social theory.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Theory, Film, Technology, Ghosts, Spiritualism

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 24, 2000

Reviews

[Stephanie McGarrah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book could have been so much better but I gave it five stars anyway for the subject. When I came across this title I was so excited. It combines my love of the strange, paranormal and uncanny while looking at peoples anxieties toward technological progress.

Sadly it was too dry and academic for what is a fascinating study, but still worth reading if it sounds interesting to you. I'd love for this to be expanded upon.

[Sharon A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absorbing and interesting until you get to the Chapter on television where the language goes into academese and becomes cumbersome and meaningless jargon. Still worth having for the references and story it tells. I have not seen another book that covers this topic.

[Michael]

I've been blogging about "the popular uncanny" over at http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/ as I revise my upcoming book on that topic for Guide Dog Books next spring. In my research, I've come across numerous references to "Haunted Media" and I have been reading it with great interest. It's a wonderful cultural history of our tendency to imbue television and other electronic media with a sense of autonomous "life" that is both uncanny and spectacular. Great (academic) read. I'll blog about the book itself when I'm done with it.

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

For all its fluency in academic jargon and its impressively wide-ranging body of references (from table-rapping to "The Matrix"), the study presented by this book is hardly worth wading through. That the advent of electronic "reality"has serious implications for the human sense of self is a fascinating premise, if a rather obvious one; if Sconce had examined the ramifications of these implications, rather than merely cataloguing the media in which this premise plays a major role, this book might have gotten somewhere. Boring and unhelpful.

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

It starts superb with the interconnection between the birth of telegraphy and Spiritualist movement in the US. Really like the theorisation of 'electronic elsewhere.' However, it drags on the last two chapter about television—little about the media, more about the content of the media. Nevertheless, the writing style and the obscure findings that Sconce offers in this book is an experience for me to see the potential of haunting machine (would be great to see the similiar approach from non-western media technology i.e. the golden age of Islamic automaton machine.)

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative, generous, and informed by critical theory – without coming under its controlling dominance – Haunted Media is a nice introductory tour around the technological developments, media documents, and cultural movements contributing to a sense of uncanniness in media technologies. While I'd have liked further information in a more organized way on the technology at play, that would be for a different book perhaps, and I did enjoy Sconce's writerly tone.

[Pilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book I had to read for a university class. I had some great historical points on the evolution of media and its interaction with people. I only had to read selected chapters, so my rating isn't based on a read of the entire book.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Really well written, convincing, and interesting.

[Jeffrey Higgins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Should be 3.5 but Goodreads hates fractions. The book is mostly excellent until the last chapter, where Sconce loses himself in a shallow reading of "postmodernism" that somehow equates Debord & Baudrillard without understanding much of either. Really his beef seems to be with B., which is fine, but his insistence that "certain varieties of postmodern media theory may be only more specialized incarnations of a popular form of occult fiction" remains unconvincing, if only the "only" part. Sconce doesn't engage much with the theory he critiques, spending his time instead recounting in great detail the plots of old TV shows and pulp fiction stories. Absent from it all (until the last page and a half, if we're being generous) is any sense of political economy, as if new technologies emerge fully formed from the heads of their creators to take their place among the fevered fantasies and living rooms of the masses unprovoked, a fantasy of a fantasy of a migraine headache. Leave it to an Americanist to depoliticize technology. Talk about occlusion!

[Adam Maric-Cleaver]

Gotta say, this book slaps kinda hard.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both enjoyable and informative, this book takes on an incredibly large time span in order to explore the continuities and discontinuities of media "liveness". Sconce is a lively writer who has a knack for finding quirky, yet poignant examples of the phenomena he describes. While I wasn't always 100% convinced of the historical accuracy of the conclusions he drew, I was entertained enough not to care. And his final chapter, which is far more theory-heavy than anything that comes before, brings everything together such that gaps or inconsistencies regarding previous accounts are smoothed away by his lucid insights into postmodernism.

[Ernesto Priani saiso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un ensayo fascinante que combina la seriedad más académica, con un recorrido ágil y grato por todas las fantasías de descorporizacion que están asociadas con tres tecnologías claves del siglo XX: el telégrafo, el radio y la televisión.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, illuminating book on media studies and American social history. So good.

[Robert Rauschenberg]

Recommended by Maria Gaspar.