CIAC's ELECTRONIC MAGAZINE
no 38
DECEMBER 2010
Editorial
"We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.”
Daniel J. Boorstin
A few years ago, I discovered Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media: Electronic Presence, from Telegraphy to Television (2000). I was fascinated by the history and detailed analysis of the so called media “ghosts”. From Morse code to television, our beliefs, often related to the intangible aspect of new technologies, have truly made us animist.
As soon as I finished reading the book, I asked myself: Who and what would be the ghosts of the Web? Is the Web haunted in the same way than other medias? The author of Haunted Media as well as other specialists and artists of cyberculture, Web art and video games cultures undertook a ghost hunting and came back with reflexions giving a better understanding of the "haunted web" experiences.
Besides the colossal number of websites dedicated to paranormal phenomenon, Web artists and video games designers, through their media specificities, successfully convey their haunted experiences to the netsurfer. If Jeffrey Sconce identifies a new form of haunted experience within the realm of surveillance on the Web, in cultural productions, it rather comes through iconographies and subjects as varied as those of death, war, ghosts, oracles, memory, amnesia, animism, obsession and horror.
To haunt : isn't a strategy to place something in an individual or common consciousness in order to maintain its survival? In light of the texts and works of issue number 38, we understand how much the haunted experience is related both to personal and collective imaginary and also how much it is dependent on our emotional investment. If the haunted experience can't be coherently explained, it is because it relies entirely on participation. The haunted experience only occupies the mind of whom undertakes, consciously or not, such an experiment.
Join our Facebook community for our weekly “haunted post” as well as further details and information on the Haunted Web thematic.
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