Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to TelevisionIn 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 present: 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. |
Contents
Mediums and Media | 21 |
The Voice from the Void | 59 |
Alien Ether | 92 |
Static and Stasis | 124 |
Simulation and Psychosis | 167 |
Notes | 211 |
233 | |
249 | |
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alien American antennae argue audience Baudrillard body broadcast century communication consciousness cultural cyberspace dead death device diegesis discorporative discourses disembodied domestic early elec electrical electromagnetic electronic elsewhere electronic media electronic presence emerging episode etheric ocean experience extraterrestrial fantastic fascination feminine film ghosts human hyperreality Ibid illusion imagination increasingly invisible Leyden jar listeners living magnetism Mars Martian mass mass media Max Headroom medium mediumship messages metaphor modern mysterious oblivion occult Outer Limits outer space panic paranormal phenomena Pinker planet popular postmodern radio Raudive realm schizophrenia science fiction scientific scientists screen seemingly sense signal simulation sion sitcom social Spigel spirit world Spiritualist static story subjectivity suggested tale tele telecommunications telepathy telepresence television set television's theory theremin tion transmission tronic Truman Show TV set Twilight Zone uncanny University utopian viewers virtual reality vision voices void wire wireless women York