Early in 2010, administrators at a high school in suburban Philadelphia called sophomore Blake Robbins to the principal’s office. There, school officials confronted Robbins with photographic evidence that the 15-year-old was dealing drugs. The photo in question showed Robbins working on his computer at home, a suspicious array of multi-colored capsules strewn across the teen’s desk. But this photo was not shot by Robbins or any of his friends, nor was it discovered as an over-revealing post on Robbins’ Face Book page. Incredibly, the school itself had covertly snapped the photo through the webcam on Blake’s computer, an Apple laptop that arrived in the Robbins home as part of a district initiative to ensure every student had Internet access. What students did not know about, and what the school district went to great effort to conceal, was the installation of “spyware” (literally!) that allowed officials to monitor, not only the user’s desktop documents and browser activity, but also the actual bodies of the student body as they sat in front of their computer screens. This software enabled school officials to snap a clandestine photo from the webcam every 15 minutes. Sued by the Robbins family for this egregious invasion of privacy, the district eventually admitted to having some 66,000 such photos of various students stored on a central server. Was Blake actually selling drugs? Subsequent review of the images revealed the bright “capsules” to be what Blake had always claimed—pieces of Mike ‘n’ Ike’s candy. In October of 2010, the school district settled the lawsuit for $610,000, only a few weeks after Tyler Clementi--a Freshman at Rutgers University--committed suicide in an even more high-profile case of webcam surveillance. A few days after learning that his college roommate had secretly activated the webcam in their dorm room to videostream Clementi’s intimate encounter with another young man across campus and presumably the world, the humiliated and depressed student jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge.

As was perhaps inevitable, the Internet (as shorthand for a complex of technologies allowing the digital circulation of media content) appears poised to make all of our most paranoid fears and fantasies come true, especially when one combines the webcam’s capacity for literal surveillance with the extensive data profiles generated and stored everyday through the routine use of our computers. The imperious presence of electronic media in the home has always been a source of concern, of course, providing a conduit to potentially dangerous forces beyond the household. No sooner did telephones appear in homes at the turn of the last century, stories began circulating in fiction and folklore about phone calls from the dead. Freed from the material grounding of a “wire,” meanwhile, radio suggested the possibility of discarnate voices, spirits, and consciousness adrift in the ether, casting the new electronic hearth of the home as a potential gateway to otherworldly powers. Indeed, many prominent intellectuals of the teens and twenties remained convinced that “wireless” phenomena portended an ultimate reconciliation of physics and metaphysics, looking to the still influential concept of the “ether” as a universal medium of physical and psychic energy. Television added the uncanny dimension of distant sight to this procession of haunted media. Theories of the ether as a medium of disembodied souls may no longer figure in mainstream science, but the idea that the television might serve as a portal to other worlds and other realities has remained a widespread suspicion in popular culture for over half a century.

All electronic media, one could argue, suspend and interrogate the relationship between consciousness and the body, producing the illusion that “thought”--transformed into electrical energy--might circulate free of the material brain. This has been a fundamental principle of telepathic research since the late 19th century, and much of the “haunting” of modernity and beyond involved entertaining this metaphoric relationship between man and machine, thought and energy, in ever-changing arrays of media practice. Given this lineage, one might expect computer and Internet to simply extend this occult logic into a more high-tech haunting of the 21st century. And in fact sporadic stories have circulated of mysterious file folders spontaneously appearing on desktops (even the dead must remain productive, it would seem), not to mention various spooks and spirits said to be trapped in the global current of the World Wide Web. But these older modes of “haunting” remain for the most part alien to computer hardware and web culture. The uncanny powers attending the computer age have generally been more about the hubris of the living than the return of the dead. Early in cyber-discourse, for example, professional futurists put great faith in the idea that human consciousness would soon be digitized and uploaded into a mainframe, thereby ensuring a certain form of immortality beyond the body (assuming, of course, one had arranged to be “backed-up” on several servers in the event of a power outage). Virtual reality also held great potential, at least in the realm of science-fantasy, as a utopian space where the long-honored line dividing subject and object, thought and reality, would at last be erased, making for a world of boundless creativity and improvisation no longer hindered by the mind’s unfortunate subjugation to an aging platform of meat.

Of late, however, even this mythology appears to have faded somewhat in capturing the popular imagination (with the notable exception of Avatar (2009), a film that cleverly reworked the “virtual reality” premise to better fit our wondrous era of tele-warfare). In its place, we have real-life horror stories like that of Blake Robbins and Tyler Clementi, the Internet serving less as a portal to the haunted unknown than as an instrument of targeted surveillance and power (be it the state educational complex or hierarchies of teenage humiliation). This anxiety has its comic dimensions as well, especially in the intergenerational struggles over “sexting” (teenagers texting photos of their genitals to one another, either oblivious to or unconcerned about the fact that all digital information now lives forever). The “old” media evoked an uncanny of the analogue imagination, a space wherein various entities might be contacted, substituted, and exchanged through a common foundation in electrical being. The new digital platforms, on the other hand, evoke a dread focused on a more oppressive mode of encryption, a fear (based on a suspicion, based on empirical evidence) that the ultimate goal of the “computer age” is to encode, circulate, and store everything on earth as information. After all, before the Internet made our desktops portals to the consumer and communications playground of the World Wide Web, the computer existed primarily for the rational accumulation and processing of information, a function frequently addressed in science-fiction as the nightmare of the overly rational, overly administrated technocracy. In such a scenario, the seemingly limitless freedom of digital circulation is merely an illusion that distracts us from a more alarming reality. The Web does not exist for us to “explore,” but is instead a medium that, like clay, takes on the impression of our unique interaction with it. Moments of naked surveillance, like the webcam scandals attending Robbins and Clementi, become sensational in that their evocation of traditional “spying” makes this constant process of silent encoding momentarily visible.

In this new environment of media “convergence,” an era when all earlier platforms—cinema, television, music, etc—are inexorably moving toward mass translation into a universal language of binary code, can any medium still be “haunted?” In the 1950s, when television was still new to the living room, horror and science-fiction repeatedly invoked the TV set as reversible window on the (other)worldly, a device capable of bringing distant vision to the home or, presumably, visions within the home to distant worlds. Going one step further, stories also circulated of people actually falling through the television screen, transformed into electrical energy and then trapped inside the world of the cathode ray tube. Certainly, secret powers and possibilities continue to lurk on the web, but increasingly the anxieties provoked by this digital unknown focus less on transformation than on translation, less on the mysterious and otherworldly realm of ghosts than on suspect institutions of known power—corporations, the government, parents, enemies, criminals, etc. If the analogue media of the twentieth-century evoked the mysteries separating the physical and metaphysical bodies, digital media provoke anxieties along the increasingly collapsing boundary between identity and information. To stare too deeply into a television set, especially one filled with static and ghosts, was to tempt the fate of Carol Anne in Poltergeist (1982), a little girl sucked into an otherworldly dimension of the dead. To stare, or more accurately, engage too deeply in the Web is to risk the revelation and gradual stripping of one’s surface identity, to lose control of the data profile that increasingly stands in for “you” and “me” in the global order of information. The haunted media of the 20th century threatened to assimilate the soul, the very essence of our metaphysical being, in a conflict between material reality and the prospects of a world beyond the senses. Having today mostly acceded to the rationalist implementation of power through data, now we are increasingly haunted by the perhaps even more terrifying prospect that digital media reduce us to a purely numerical identity constantly vulnerable to “theft.” Principals steal our domestic privacy. Roommates upload our secret sexual identities. Criminals fish for the credit card and government numbers that define us in the consumer state. The Internet is thus less haunted by ghosts than by a more diffuse alliance of powers that constantly seek to encode our secrets—sexual, ideological, consumerist, political—into a coldly invasive logic of 1’s and 0’s, one that separates and alienates us, not from the metaphysics of spirit, but from our own social identities as pure information.

top
back