Ghosting: On Disappearance (Polity, 2025) — ORDER
“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 . . . [and] 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
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.
Dominic Pettman 