Ghosting existed in some form long before modern technology made it ubiquitous. “Disappearing without word or warning is no doubt as old as the human race,” the cultural theorist Dominic Pettman notes in his slim new book, Ghosting. The infant first detecting maternal absence, the pet abandoned in an alley, the friend suddenly iced out have all felt the sudden departure of someone who was expected to be there. What has changed in recent years, Pettman argues, is the ease—and cruelty—with which people can enter and exit one another’s lives. Today’s version of ghosting, he writes, “is abandonment with a contemporary garnish”; a plethora of options for ignoring others have turned it into a “universal, even banal, experience.” Or, as he puts it pithily, “when we came up with texting, we also came up with not texting.”
I was curious to read Pettman’s book, because I’d been thinking about the banality of ghosting—or, rather, how it can seem so commonplace as to be expected and, at the same time, be hurtful and infuriating. Culturally, ghosting is a paradox. It can be something you brush off even as it lives rent-free in your head.
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