internet as otherworldly answering device

The one below reminds me of another book that's sitting on the bookshelf in my bathroom. Unread of course. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siècle. She argues that as new technologies, such as the telegraph and the telephone, began suffusing the public imagination from the mid-nineteenth century on, they seemed to support the claims of spiritualist mediums. Making unexpected connections between, for instance, speaking on the telephone and speaking to the dead, she examines how psychical research is reflected in the work of Henry James, George DuMaurier and Oscar Wilde among others. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. It seems to me that talking (or not talking) on the telephone often is like speaking to the dead. In Haunted Media (pp. 170-171), Jeffrey Sconce plays with the idea ...that postmodern theory is in itself simply another in a long series of occult fantasies inspired by electronic media. Considered in this respect, film, television, and mainstream fiction have not popularized postmodern theory so much as postmodern theory has rarefied a series of long-circulating superstitions bound to the historical imagination of electronic presence. Within the mythos of postmodernity, television often appears as a mystery box somehow capable of exorcising human subjectivity and conjuring a hallucinatory realm that hovers above the referential rubble of contemporary culture. Where there was once the "real," there is now only the electronic generation and circulation of almost supernatural simulations. Where there was once stable human consciousness, there are now only the ghosts of fragmented, decentered, and increasingly schizophrenic subjectivities.

“no plot, no characters, very realistic. i think it's the next thing...

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