Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television

TLDR

The book traces how Americans have long associated electronic communication with ghosts, linking the rise of the telegraph in the 1840s to spiritualist practices and later to television, framing the phenomenon as a persistent cultural trope. Sconce surveys and documents the use of electrical communication as a metaphor for spirits, extraterrestrials, and virtual reality across five eras—from the telegraph to cyberspace—by analyzing literature, films, radio, and television in a structured, chapter‑by‑era format.

Abstract

Haunted Media pursues the ghost in the machine, the idea that Americans have always “seen ghosts” in electronic communications, from telegraph to television. Jeffrey Sconce surveys a variety of discourses that used electrical communication as metaphors to talk about spirits, extraterrestrials, and postmodern virtual reality. From the 1840s to the present, he documents the recurring use of such tropes in explanations of paranormal communication, in science fiction and fantasy literature, and in movies, radio, and television shows themselves. The book is composed of an introduction and one chapter each on five eras in which new communication technologies caught the fancy of the public and of writers: the early telegraph in the antebellum era, the wireless telegraph at the turn of the century, network radio broadcasting in the 1920s, television in the early 1960s, and cyberspace today. Sconce describes the coincident births of telegraph and spiritualism in the 1840s. Telegraph's ability to allow people to talk with each other throug h an electrical wire was mysterious. Spiritualism was based on another mystery, communicating with the spirit world. Spiritualists explained their “spiritual telegraphy” in terms of electrical phenomena. He says even scientists of the time took seriously the mixture of the physical and spiritual and the use of electricity to communicate with spirits.