Television ghosts: A cultural history of electronic presence in telecommunications technology

This dissertation provides a detailed social and cultural history of "electronic presence" in telecommunications technology over the last two hundred years. It examines how properties of "liveness" and "simultaneity" in electronic media have been elaborated in differing cultural and technological contexts into a more socially expressive metaphysics of living "presence." In chapters concentrating on the cultural articulation of presence in telegraphy, wireless, network radio, and early television, the dissertation examines how interrelated metaphors of "flow" have suggested a logic of transmutability between electricity, consciousness, and textuality. The often fantastic stories and commentaries informed by this logic have provided a cultural space in which to negotiate the emerging social applications of each technology, a process beginning with Morse's electro-magnetic telegraph and flourishing today in contemporary discourses of cyberspace and virtual reality. Following this trope across media history, the dissertation argues that cultural accounts of "presence" in telecommunications technology have gradually changed from a fascination with confronting boundaries of space and time into a more generalized anxiety over the seeming sovereignty of electronic textuality.