Ghosting - by Dominic Pettman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Abandonment is as old as time, but ghosting is a modern twist on this ancient experience. It translates this age-old phenomenon into our modern world of screens, delete buttons and blocking options. Ghosting is not only an unpleasant experience, or cowardly act, but a symptom of our increasingly spectral - that is, mediated and virtual - relationship to the world. The overabundance of new modes of communication has invited an almost infinite number of contacts and conversations. At the same time, it has also offered an unprecedented opportunity for ignoring messages from others. And just as we invented the car crash when we invented automobiles, we also encouraged ghosting when we created the internet.

Ghosting creates an empty space in our minds: a space faithfully tracing the silhouette of the one who ghosted us. But unlike traditional ghosts, today's ghosters simply disappear, leaving behind a form of haunting that is closer to mourning: mourning for someone who is not in fact dead. In putting a kind of preemptive mourning into our everyday affairs, ghosting tells us much about the current human relationship - or non-relationship - to a shared sense of mortality, purpose, and spirit.

This book - the first sustained analysis of ghosting - traces the source of this vexed experience to, and through, our current media ecology, technological networks, political landscape, collective psychology, romantic mantras, and deep sense of social neglect.

Review Quotes

"This inventive text demonstrates that 'ghosting', widely perceived as an unfortunate side-effect of an increasingly mediated world, speaks to a more fundamental human absence. Surveying an impressive array of literature, philosophy, and media theory, Pettman convincingly adds 'ghosting' to our century's collective process of melancholy and mourning."
Jeffrey Sconce, author of Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television

"This is a unique and compelling book - current, contemporary, and extremely well written. The author has a gift for exploring this topic like he is telling a story. He sheds fresh light on what is an everyday experience for us all."
Zizi A. Papacharissi, author of Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology and Politics

"It is easier than ever to communicate with other people -- and to deliberately ignore them. In his book, Ghosting, Dominic Pettman lays down the rules of disengagement... I know I'm not the only one who will be glad someone finally put that strange feeling into words."
Ceci Browning, The Sunday Times

"Ghosting: On Disappearance, takes a philosophical look at people vanishing, and how ghosting each other has replaced traditional ghosts, in whom we tend to no longer believe."
Irish Examiner

"Pettman's book might best be read as comfort for the ghosted, providing a conceptual framework and a history of the idea. (You are not the first to be ghosted, and you won't be the last)."
Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker

"Pettman is alert to the sadism of gratuitous ghosting, the pernicious brand of paranoia, social and personal, it encourages, and to its links to the selfish satisfactions of domination and indifference."
The Arts Fuse

"Perhaps there's room for more curiosity, room for ghosting to be, if not embraced, at least better understood."
The Atlantic

"Intriguing... [Pettman's] analysis of the haunted of our world is compelling."
Tara Isabella Burton, The Wall Street Journal

"Pettman achieves what one expects from a strong cultural essay: he illuminates how an apparently trivial gesture--failing to respond, slipping out of someone's life--condenses broader social tensions and, without melodrama, exposes the fragility of our contemporary ways of being with others."
Cultural Sociology

"Placing his authorial thumb and forefinger on the touchscreen of this modern inevitability, Dominic Pettman enlarges its finer gradations across emotional, social, and technological contexts. He pinches and stretches the phenomenon until its translucent membrane reveals something more fundamental: that to vanish is to be human and that to experience the vanishing of another is to feel the sting of impermanence."
ECM Reviews

About the Author

Dominic Pettman is the author of numerous books, including Infinite Distraction, Peak Libido, and, with Eugene Thacker, Sad Planets. He teaches at The New School.