Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (review)

Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. By Jeffrey Sconce. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000; pp. x + 257. $54.95 cloth; $18.95 paper.

Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television examines material from some unusual corners of popular culture: legends of ghosts inhabiting televisions, stories of alien conquest through media, and attempts to contact the dead through telegraphy. This material would appear to be destined to remain interesting footnote material at best, but to Sconce's credit he shows the strong relationship between this marginalia and some of the central concepts of media: liveness, the network, and flow.

Why do we call television news reports "live"? Haunted Media details the history of the idea that media from the telegraph to radio, television, and computers have a "living presence," that they can put us in instantaneous contact with existing realms outside our normal senses. Fantasy narratives and human-interest stories allow us to consider that those realms might include the spirit world and other planets. It is through these more outlandish tales that Sconce helps us see the same governing ideas in more ordinary media.

Sconce deals with the metaphors that shape our understanding of media: "nets," "streams," "currents," and "flow." He does not limit his discussion to demonstrating how these metaphors function within media, but he also situates them in their histories of broader cultural circulation. For example, the book begins by considering how the discourses of nineteenth-century spiritualism and telegraphy influenced each other, each one promising point-to-point communication with disembodied speakers. Not only did telegraphy leave its mark on spiritualism by trying to make it more "scientific," but spiritualism also left a lasting mark on media, creating a sense of voices in a vast and lonely "ether."

The story told here shows how media's living presence changes from a somewhat comforting though uncanny notion (being able to contact one's departed loved ones) to a potentially enveloping "ocean." Sconce interweaves forgotten stories with the more central moments in broadcast history, such as the role of the wireless in the Titanic disaster. Spotty wireless operators "fishing" for signals become both the heroes that save some drowning victims and the reason that other dying voices go unheard. The stories of death and dying, from electronic seances to shipwrecks to World War I battle reports, color our understanding of what the "new" medium of wireless radio can do.

As broadcast radio becomes dominant, superstition becomes less important to media and superscience becomes increasingly so. The dominant media metaphor shifts to a fearful notion of a "net" that can both connect and imprison us. Sconce uses science fiction tales to articulate fears of the encroaching presence of broadcast radio in the domestic sphere. Here he makes use of media history's primary alien tale, the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. Because of the historical contextualization of Sconce's overall narrative, this familiar touchstone of communication history seems less an idiosyncratic anecdote and more an extension of previous discourses. Sconce notes that such tales of social control through the invasion of media into the home gained importance in academic circles just as they did in popular circulation.

With the rise of television, the Other realm of televisionland creates a foreboding "nowhere" that threatens to overtake our own real world. Series such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits literally depict the limbo that can entrap people in the "vast wasteland" of television. Throughout the book Sconce pays close attention to the social structures being invaded by media, discussing the fears of the nuclear family at the beginning of the television era as he examines the conception of hysterical femininity underlying the nineteenth-century female spiritualist.

In Sconce's boldest argument, he takes on postmodernism's hyperbolic discussion of the growing hyperreality of modern life that threatens to replace real experience with simulation. Although Baudrillard and company have...