Haunted Media: Fantasies of Electric Immortality

Jeffrey Sconce is Professor in the Screen Cultures program and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2020-2021. Back in 2000, he published Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, which looked at how electronic media and the occult have always been intertwined, right back to the telegraph. He's the guest on this episode of Still Spoken, a wide-ranging chat about horror films, Freud, Spiritualists and seances, immortalists of Silicon Valley, posthumous electronic revenge, and whether you can expect your dog (not all dogs, just your favourite dog) to greet you in heaven. 

As always, the interviewer is Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data; the interview took place in 2021. Jeffrey Sconce's more recent book is The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity (2019).

This podcast written and produced by Elaine Kasket. I do this ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests.

If you want a simple start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get an accessible, easy  podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

Music and sound effects in this episode:

All music used under license from Epidemic Sound. In order of play:

Synthesis Malfunction (Oh The City)
Confused Mind (Stationary Sign)
Snooper's Paradise (Jon Björk)
Dingle Dangle (Jerry Lacey)

Get to know Elaine's writing on Substack and Medium.

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