Andreas Kitzmann

Institute for Culture and Communication
University of Karlstad, Sweden
andreas.kitzmann@kau.se

 

Review of: Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.

 

Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media confirms a familiar suspicion. There is something lurking within the electronic devices that surround us: something more than just organized electrical impulses, something just beyond the range of our perception, something we can feel, hear, see, and even speak to.

 

Sconce’s thesis is relatively straightforward. Telecommunications technology is often perceived as possessing some strange sort of magic, some indescribable “presence” that turns it into a potent incubator for a host of metaphysical, philosophical, or spiritual narratives and fantasies. Such a notion is, as Sconce argues, a social construct that is as much a product of historical and cultural contexts as it is of the sometimes “uncanny” characteristics of the technology itself. The key aim of Haunted Media is to perform what Sconce terms a cultural history of electronic presence in an effort to better understand the fantasies and fictions with which it has become associated. In this respect Sconce is in familiar company. Works by authors such as Sadie Plant, Margaret Wertheim, and Erik Davis also attempt to locate present trends in telecommunications technology within a larger framework of the history of spirituality and superstition. Yet where Sconce’s approach is markedly different is in the precision of his historical comparison. Haunted Media does not reach back to the writings of Hermes Trismegistus or the rituals of medieval monks in an effort to probe our cultural fantasies about technology. Instead, he focuses on the relatively short period between the inception of the telegraph and contemporary digital technology, and he limits his discussion to the specific narratives, rituals, and conceptions generated by the electronic age. His narrative is thus much less grand than those of similar historians–a characteristic that, as I shall discuss below, makes Haunted Media a unique and important work.

 

Sconce is driven by a nagging question: “why after 150 years of electronic communication, do we still so often ascribe mystical powers to what are ultimately very material technologies?” (6). In responding to such a question, Sconce takes the reader through a remarkable and amusing set of historical materials. The telegraph, the radio, the television, and the computer have all generated a host of cultural fantasies, which, as Sconce documents, are as consistent as they are strange. Yet such consistency should not be taken as a kind of “transcendent essence” or grand narrative of communications technology, but rather as “the product of a series of historically specific intersections of technological, industrial and cultural practices” (199). Haunted Media is thus organized around the exploration of such intersections, beginning with the primitive pulses of the first telegraph and ending with current developments in digital communications technology.

 

For Sconce there are “three recurring fictions or stories” and “five distinct moments in the popular history of electronic presence” that need to be considered (8). The first of these stories is about disembodiment that allows the communicating subject “the ability, real or imagined, to leave the body and transport his or her consciousness to a distant destination” (9).The second and closely related fiction tells of a sovereign electronic world that is somehow beyond the material realm that we mortals live in. A cast of androids and cyborgs inhabits the third fiction, which addresses the anthropomorphizing of media technology. These three stories, Sconce asserts, have been told countless times during the last 150 years. Yet, as Sconce is quick to emphasize, it is the discontinuities that matter more than the supposed similarities. “Tales of paranormal media are important, then, not as timeless expressions of some undying electronic superstition but as a permeable language in which to express a culture’s changing social relationship to a historical sequence of technologies” (10).

 

Such a “permeable language” is at work in the five “moments” that Sconce details in his book’s five chapters. The first of these moments revolves around the development of the telegraph during the nineteenth century and the manner in which it is closely associated with the rise and methods of the Spiritualist movement. Indeed, for Sconce the telegraph spawned the “media age’s first electronic elsewhere” and, as such, forms the basis for many contemporary narratives of telecommunications technology (57). For this reason there is much to be gained by a closer examination of the expectations and fantasies engendered by the telegraph. Of the more important fantasies associated with the telegraph is the notion that the mind and the body can be split and that the telegraph can be employed to enact or temporarily reverse such a separation. Consequently, the telegraph served as a convenient metaphor (and sometimes a means) for Spiritualists to invoke in their explorations of the supernatural. As in the rest of the book, it is Sconce’s descriptions and reconstructions of historical material that make this book so satisfying. His well-chosen examples not only add to the force of his arguments but also make for good reading–no mean feat when it comes to the thick prose common in much cultural theory.

 

Equally central to this first chapter are the connections drawn between Spiritualism, technology, and the rights of women. As has been well documented in other works, notably Ann Braude’s Radical Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, there is a close alignment between the Spiritualist movement and the rise of women’s rights. Sconce develops this argument further by inserting technology into the mix. The telegraph’s apparent ability to access an “electronic elsewhere” corresponded to the then general view that women are more sensitive creatures and thus more apt to access the realms that lie just beyond the edges of the rational, observable world. In this way the telegraph, and electricity itself, more generally, served as convenient metaphors for female Spiritualists. On the one hand the telegraph represented the verifiable world of rational science and technology, but on the other it served as a powerful testament to the “reality” of disembodied being. Female Spiritualists, Sconce argues, made good use of this dualism and gained a measure of respect and social status as a result. However, their empowerment was only temporary since the discourses of science and psychoanalysis eventually categorized the traits of female spiritualism as “deviations” and thus in need of treatment and correction.

 

The chapter “The Voice from the Void” details the so-called second moment in Sconce’s cultural history. After the telegraph, the wireless radio represents the next major breakthrough in the development of communications technology. Sconce’s focus here is on what he terms the “paradox of the wireless” (62). On the one hand, the wireless promised to bring the whole globe together via its unprecedented ability to offer instant communication across great distances. Yet, at the same time, it also threatened to increase social isolation and alienation by virtue of the fact that the boundaries of space, nation, and body were no longer the constants they once appeared to be. Consequently, the cultural fantasies and stories associated with the wireless are a mix of utopian visions and anxious melancholy. One consistent metaphor used to represent the wireless is the etheric ocean that, while offering great opportunities for exploration, was also threatening in the sense that its sheer size dwarfed the relevance and agency of any one individual. Such anxiety finds its representation in many of the popular short stories and novels written during the early 1920s. In such stories, the wireless ether is frequently inhabited by the ghosts of the dead who, in one way or another, manage to contact the living via the wireless radio set. Such scenarios were not confined to fiction. Sconce also documents various attempts at “mental radio,” in which the wireless was seriously employed as a medium of telepathy (75). Less extreme was the popular activity of “DX fishing,” where thousands of amateur radio enthusiasts would relentlessly scour the as yet unregulated airwaves in search of distant voices–either from this world or the next (65). Again, the discursive backdrop here is a mix of hope and pessimism, which for Sconce represents one of the major strains of the modern condition and, as such, is deeply connected to specific historical and cultural contexts.

 

In the third moment, as detailed in the chapter “Alien Ether,” the wireless makes the transition from an unregulated ocean of communication to the structured broadcast model still in use today. The central aim of this chapter is to examine “the transformation in the popular perception of electronic presence from one of melancholy mystery to one of escalating alienation” (94). For Sconce, a good part of this mounting alienation can be explained by an often unarticulated resistance to the increasing standardization of the radio medium. The bulk of the apparent resistance was found not in the work of media activists but in the fictionalized serials and short stories of pulp science fiction. Thus, Sconce recounts a number of bizarre and absurd tales of alien invasion that he sees as representing, in part, “the social struggle over determining radio’s purpose and future” (95). Sconce’s argument is insightful here in the sense that it highlights the extent to which social and cultural unease often finds its initial representation in popular fantasies and stories. This unease is most potently represented in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which Sconce describes as “the most famous public lesson in an uncomfortable political reality: the collapse of the media is by definition a collapse of the social” (116). Central to the debates that followed the initial broadcast was the question of faith–faith in the radio (and thus media) as a system of belief. Once disrupted, additional walls began to tumble. Another legacy of the War of the Worlds is, of course, the familiar intertwining of aliens, fascism, and conspiracy within the popular imagination.

 

The chapter “Static and Stasis” encompasses the fourth moment in Sconce’s chronology, with the development of television being the prime area of focus. Like earlier communications media, television generated its own peculiar brand of public fantasies and obsessions. Most prevalent is the notion that television seemed capable of generating autonomous spirit worlds, meaning that ghosts did not speak through television but seemed to live inside of them (127). Television thus becomes a portal into a dynamic and perpetual presence that is continuously live and available. Television-land is a real place that not only brings a version of the world into our living rooms, but as Sconce explores more deeply within his final chapter, is also capable of effectively simulating and replacing reality itself. As with previous media forms, the promises and fantasies of television created a range of specific anxieties and concerns. Sconce again turns to popular culture to identify and explore these concerns, with programs such as the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits serving as prime examples. Characterizing these and many other programs, films, and fictions is a form of self-reflexivity that highlights the potentially dangerous relationship that audiences could have with television. Television in this sense takes on almost narcotic characteristics, and as such is generally addictive and ultimately self-destructive.

 

The fifth and final moment, discussed in the chapter “Simulation and Psychosis,” continues with the analysis of television but concludes with speculations on the impact of digital communications technology. As presented in the previous chapter, the magic of television is derived mainly from its ability to generate autonomous worlds–an ability that today has developed into an increasingly expanding and all-encompassing electronic universe. Television, as Sconce represents it, has effectively colonized the majority of private and public life–at least in North America–by perfecting the illusion that the diegetic time of any given television series or broadcast is aligned with that of the viewer. To watch television is thus to tune into the live and the real. Although Sconce does not discuss this (and this is perhaps an oversight on his part), the recent trend of Reality TV comes to mind. If anything captures the “ideology of liveness” and the illusions of immediacy and simulation, it is a program such as Big Brother or Temptation Island.

 

In addition to exploring the “television universe” by way of selective examples from the annals of broadcast television, Sconce also develops the potentially contentious idea that certain varieties of postmodern theory are little more than specialized (and “jargonized”) incarnations of popular fictions. Thus, sophisticated ruminations by the likes of Sadie Plant, Donna Haraway, or Arthur Kroker can be seen as re-articulating fantasies that have long been in the public arena. The various tales of the ’50s and ’60s, for example, demonstrate that popular culture was equally engaged with the questions of contemporary electronic media that occupied the postmodern criticism of the ’70s and ’80s. Such a proposal is perhaps troubling to critics who are heavily invested in either the promise or perils of digital technology. As Sconce asks within the final few pages of his book, perhaps virtuality is more a construct of the imagination than of technology. Perhaps the concept of cyberspace itself is a “consensual hallucination” (204). Troubling for Sconce is the observation that many theoretical treatments of digital communications technology tend to treat subjectivity, identity, and fantasy as equivalent and interchangeable terms (208). Such naiveté is not only academically dubious–it is little more than a fantastic folk tale about the ghosts and their machines.

 

Haunted Media is an important addition to the cultural history of communications and media technology. Sconce’s work vividly captures the effect of communications technology on the popular imagination in a manner that distinguishes it from comparative projects such as those of Wertheim, Davis, and Plant. What I find particularly notable is Sconce’s resistance to the grand narrative, which one could argue is central to works such as Wertheim’s The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace or Davis’s Techgnosis. Although attempting to identify a number of common threads that link various historical moments to one another, Sconce repeatedly stresses that discontinuity is more likely than continuity, and that any comparisons between different eras must always be grounded within the particularities of their time. It is perhaps for this reason that Sconce has decided to limit his analysis to the last 150 years rather than attempting to identify discursive threads that, in the case of Plant’s Zeroes + Ones, reach as far back as the dawn of humankind. The comparatively limited range of the historical period under analysis provides a welcome measure of specificity. As well, Sconce’s decision to mine the depths of popular culture as a means to identify his “stories” and “moments” provides the added element of familiarity. Unlike the medieval monasteries to which Wertheim links contemporary discourses of cyberspace, Sconce traces bad science fiction plots and bizarre antics in the world’s media-scape, plots and antics that continue to inhabit popular imagination and therefore represent a part of ongoing, everyday reality.

 

Accordingly, Sconce is less reliant on selected and fanciful revisions of the past than authors who craft more mythic narratives of what one may term the metaphysics of media technology. Indeed, given the nature of Sconce’s subject matter, the grounded quality of his work is even more noteworthy. Sconce manages to engage with his material in a manner that balances his obvious enthusiasm with just the right amount of critical distance, creative license, and restrained cynicism. That he kept himself from falling into a well of New Age rumination is indeed something to be thankful for. This factor in itself will help sustain the book’s critical longevity and keep it from being yet another rhetorical ghost collecting dust in the world’s libraries.

 

Works Cited

 

• Braude, Ann. Radical Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
• Davis, Erik. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York: Harmony Books, 1998.
• Plant, Sadie. Zereos + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
• Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. New York: Norton, 1999.