The New Yorker:

We bemoan the injustice of being left on read. But perhaps missed connection is just a part of being a human on the internet.

By Kyle Chayka

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.

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