Haunted media

Historically, the dead have exploited cutting-edge communications technology to send messages to the world of the living. Their content, however, has often arrived somewhat muddled and cryptic (not, admittedly, unlike electronic correspondence originating from living sources).

Thirty years ago, a spirit, whispering in Latvian through radio static, said: “Bring a halibut.”

A hundred years ago, one pleaded, “I’ve been calling you, Harry, so long, so long, to tell you that I didn’t mean what I said.”

In 1848, when the telegraph was new, the message was simply, “Knock, knock.”

The obvious response from a member of our own modern, savvy, cynical society is, “Who’s there?” After all, to latter-day skeptics, the spirit world can seem like a bit of a joke.

But Jeffrey Sconce, an assistant professor at the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, is not convinced that credulity is on the decline. His book Haunted Media (Duke University Press, 2000) traces humanity’s tendency to ascribe spirits and consciousness to new technology, from the debut of the telegraph in 1844 to television and computers today.

In an interview, he said the form might have changed, but people attribute as much mysticism as ever to communications technology. “There is a fundamental superstition around electricity,” he said. “There are certain conventions in representing electronic media that seem to recur over and over again, one of which is this idea I call the ‘electronic elsewhere,’ this idea that electronic communications create an actual real space somewhere else that one can inhabit in some way.”

In the mid-1800s, the movement known as Spiritualism used telegraphy to contact a “higher electromagnetic plane” where the spirits live. Most famously, Kate Fox and her sisters, Margeretta and Leah, communicated with the dead by means of a spiritual telegraph; they would ask questions, and receive answers from spirits in the form of mysterious raps and knocks. The spiritual telegraph and the electronic telegraph developed side by side, and at the time, one seemed no less uncanny than the other.

Technology advanced, and stories spread (some presented as fact, some fiction) of the dead placing telephone calls to their loved ones. Then came wireless communication. The ability to cast one’s voice through the air was often described as something akin to telepathy, and a mythology developed of heartfelt and confessional messages sent from the dead to their living lovers.

More recently, a Latvian experimenter Konstantin Raudive, spent many hours listening hard for the voices of the dead amid radio static. Aside from fishy requests, Raudive discerned phrases such as “Now, now, she-wolf! I want air,” and “Pistol is our man.”

In addition to news reports, Sconce explores media hauntings in B-movies, episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, pulp fiction and other popular culture sources in the book. But he began his research because he was struck by the academic discourse concerning technology.

“I was fascinated by how much of the discussion on new media was so profoundly metaphysical in nature, and how people had these unbelievably wild ambitions and aspirations as to what this technology was going to do,” he said. “You see this unbridled enthusiasm for new media, these recurring themes of people becoming lost in virtual reality or things from virtual reality escaping into the real world, and virtuosity and so on. I became interested in trying to trace where the origins of the debate came from.”

It all comes back to electricity, the force that animates both animals and machines.

“Freud talked about things we find uncanny being animate things that are made inanimate and inanimate things that become animate. Electricity is one of the privileged ways of doing that,” Sconce said. “Once [the 18th-century Italian physicist Luigi] Galvani does these experiments that show that the human body is electrically driven, and once Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein based on Galvani’s principles, electricity becomes that bridge between humans and machines that forever confuses boundaries, whether they be cyborgs, androids or computers. Every electronic communications technology, since they’re specifically about the communication of intelligence, has just reiterated that fundamentally uncanny confusion between the animate and the inanimate.”

Movies such as The Matrix and Shocker continue to exploit this mythology, as do television faith healers. “TV psychic networks are a great example of this — the fact that they use telecommunications devices like the phone and television,” Sconce said. “It’s hard to imagine psychic novelists or psychic magazine authors.”

Raudive’s legacy also lives on. Web sites offer up-to-date information on “instrumental transcommunication,” or communication with the dead through technology. Testimonials include messages received by fax, phone, radio, television, computers and a customized device known as the Spiricom.

But Sconce argues that technology’s mysticism extends much further into postmodern society, within the academy, and outside it. One of the latest manifestations of “electronic elsewhere” is cyberspace.

“Cyberspace is, of course, just a metaphor,” he said. “There’s no such thing as cyberspace. It’s a mental construct; it’s not a physical construct. And yet we invest in that reality as if it were some actual elsewhere somewhere.”

To one and the same impetus to imbue electrical devices with near-magical powers, he attributes everything from irrationally high expectations over technology stocks to the idea that we will soon be able to gain immortality by downloading our consciousness into a computer.

Those who do worry (or dream) about getting sucked into cyberspace may wish to keep a halibut handy, just in case.