Is Ghosting Inevitable?

Any new technology created for the purpose of human connection also creates an opportunity for novel forms of missed connection: the envelope returned to sender, the unanswered phone call, the forlorn voice mail. We replace face-to-face interaction with layers of mediation, each with its own chance of breakdown. The fear of losing touch is rooted in human nature; in eleventh-century Japan, women of the imperial court fretted in the hours following a tryst, as they waited for the customary morning-after poem from their lover. Proust wrote that the “silence of the person one loves” is “more cruel than the silence of prisons.” Social media, which was supposed to bring humanity closer together, has also created a smorgasbord of new ways to be rejected—D.M.s left on read, posts gone unliked, friends unfriended—that can engender the age-old fear of being ignored. Facebook users might recall a time when a declined friend request or unrequited poke could be sources of anxiety. But worse than blatant rejection is the absence of any signal, the total disappearance of the other party. This vanishing act, called “ghosting,” has become a persistent feature of twenty-first-century life. Dominic Pettman, a cultural theorist and professor of media at the New School, in New York City, examines this contemporary phenomenon in “Ghosting: On Disappearance,” a slim new monograph published this month by Polity. “Just as we inevitably invented the car crash when we invented automobiles, we also created ghosting when we created the internet,” Pettman writes.

Ghosting most often describes an unexpected cliff appearing along the meandering path of dating life: one is suddenly abandoned by a prospective romantic partner. Conversation stops abruptly; texts or app messages go unanswered without excuse or explanation. Smartphones, always online, offer the possibility of 24/7 contact with a love interest, even if they are a relative stranger; the act of ghosting closes the channel without any recourse. Ghosters become unreachable phantoms; the ghostee may feel as though they’re facing none other than the impetuously grinning ghost emoji. But Pettman describes ghosting as an experience that transcends places like Hinge. “At a certain age, we have all been ghosted at some point in our lives. Indeed, we’ve all likely ghosted somebody in turn,” he writes. The author means this in the larger sense of abandonment—of a parent, of a friend, or even of a boss. We may aspire not to ghost, knowing the pain it causes, but technology has made ghosting, in its many forms, all but inevitable.

The emergence of the term “ghosting” both identified a unique aspect of virtual life and established it as a trope. The more often people talk about ghosting, the more people seem to ghost. In the seventeenth century, Pettman writes, “ghosted” meant “died.” In the twentieth, it could refer to images blurring on television sets owing to faulty cables or to leaving the screen on too long. In the two-thousands, the phrase gained traction online to describe “suddenly ceasing to respond to someone on social media,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defined it, in 2021. 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.) But Pettman gets bogged down in his expanded definition as he analyzes the general theme of abandonment in chapters on romantic, familial, professional, and other sorts of relationships. Greta Garbo ghosted her fans when she left her acting career just as a restaurant that closes without warning ghosts its regulars. (Pettman riffs on “ghost kitchens,” the fly-by-night food-delivery operations that are supplanting real storefronts.) According to the author, modernity is a story of serial ghosting: Charles Darwin notified us that we had been ghosted by human nature, Nietzsche that we had been ghosted by God, Jean Baudrillard that we had been ghosted by reality, and Ronald Reagan that we had been ghosted by society. In this formulation, perhaps Donald Trump is the ghoster of democracy.

There is a more specific phenomenology, yet to be charted, that exists solely in digital formats, where ghosting was, if not invented, perhaps perfected, allowing the ghoster to move from total accessibility to total inaccessibility in an instant. The internet has created an expectation of unabated interaction that did not exist before. “The digital medium is a medium of presence,” the philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote in his 2013 monograph “In the Swarm,” observing that the immediacy of digital communication created an illusion of instant connection that can be easily broken. On this token, disconnection is an illusion, too, because communication can just as quickly be restored if the other party wants it to be. Han has used centuries of philosophy to deconstruct the current ennui of life online, but Pettman’s writing is more personal and sympathetic than Han’s aphoristic, self-effacing mode. Pettman recalls an uncle of his who ghosted his family, fleeing Australia for the United Kingdom, as well as a potential employer who ghosted him after requesting his course plans, the job falling through at the last minute—memoiristic details that heighten the book’s critical insight: that such abandonment has always existed, but the internet has supercharged it.

There is an unmistakable thirst in Pettman’s quest to understand the problems of having a body in an increasingly digital age. In his 2016 book, “Infinite Distraction,” he presciently observed that personalized social-media feeds were alienating users from each other by enclosing them into distinct and disconnected silos of content, the new information architecture “likely to turn us all into paranoiacs” because we never know what one another’s feeds look like. (We are paranoid of being ghosted, of discovering that there is nothing behind the avatars of our interlocutors.) In “Peak Libido,” from 2020, Pettman identified the “general fatigue” that follows the infinitely available stimulation of the internet and argued that “fleeting and fickle cravings” have replaced deeper and more productive interpersonal desire. That book came just as pandemic quarantine caused many people to double down on virtual interaction. Other people can always ghost. What will never ghost is an A.I. chatbot or the endless stream of content offered by digital platforms.

Pettman notes that ghosting, rather than an intentional slight, is an inevitability: “We all look down on people who ghost. And yet we are all obliged to deploy this option on semi-regular occasions, given the over-connected world in which we live.” Despite its negative connotations, ghosting is necessary and can even be merciful, when compared to a prolonged fade or the slow drip of superficial digital interaction that some call “breadcrumbing.” Either we announce our disconnection out loud or we simply enact it, perhaps reinforcing the break by unmatching a suitor on a dating app or blocking a follower on social media. “Detaching is a necessary skill,” Pettman writes. If a connection is not amputated properly, one runs the risk of becoming another online archetype: the lurker, hanging around in the background of every screen.

The postponed reply isn’t a new invention, but the jilted once had plausible excuses that could soothe their nerves. A letter returned to sender might be the result of a mistaken address; an unanswered voice mail might be the sign of a busy schedule. The online ghoster, however, is often caught in the act, their attention to the message signalled by a tiny checkmark showing they read it but did not write back. The ghosted feel omniscient but not omnipotent; technology has not yet invented a way to compel a response. That may be the true source of ghosting’s frustration: these days, we’re haunted by knowing too much. ♦