You've been digitally dumped — the great ghosting epidemic

Times

2 days ago

Forget shark fins and leggy spiders, in our digital world there are few sights more nerve-racking than two grey ticks side by side, lurking underneath an unanswered WhatsApp message. Why hasn't so-and-so replied? What terrible thing have I done to provoke the silent treatment? Sometimes the answer is simply forgetfulness or a packed schedule, but when communication can so easily be instant, a person's failure to respond is often anxiously translated as: 'I hate your guts and I don't want to speak to you ever again so I'm just going to blatantly ignore you for the rest of time.' For all the sender knows, the recipient might as well be dead.
This habit of people silently retreating from each other's lives — known as ghosting — is a familiar part of the modern age and a morbid symptom of the loneliness epidemic, digital devices having made it simpler to connect with people but simultaneously simpler to get rid of them without notice or reason. In his curious book Ghosting: On Disappearance the Australian author Dominic Pettman delves into the rules of disengagement.
The definition of ghosting, added to the dictionary in 2012, is 'the action of ignoring or pretending not to know a person, especially that of suddenly ceasing to respond'. But Pettman, whose full job title is (take a deep breath here) university professor of media and new humanities and chair of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, has a more evocative take. Ghosting is the creation of empty space, he says, 'not unlike the chalk outline found at a murder scene'. Cutting off all contact allows the disappearing person to end their existence without any of 'the inconvenience of actually dying'.
To help us to understand the origins of this universally depressing yet increasingly widespread digital habit, Pettman cobbles together a short history, emphasising that the 'ancient experience' is 'inscribed in Greek myths, Chinese sagas and African folk tales'. For many centuries, ghosting used to be a synonym for death, he reveals, a clever verb for ceasing to be alive. Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra writes: 'Julius Caesar/ Who at Philippi the good Brutus ghosted.' The first use of the term in its contemporary sense appeared in the 1983 novel Gardens of Stone by Nicholas Proffitt: 'Where's Wildman? If that sad sack is ghosting again, I'll have his butt on a biscuit for breakfast.' Our modern version, Pettman argues, of ignoring WhatsApps or secretly muting Instagram followers simply updates the phenomenon for 'fluorescent-lit modernity'.
The most widely despised form of ghosting is romantic. In the analogue days it used to be relatively simple to fade into the background if a potential suitor did something to put you off. But since communication is now so rapid and so easy, 'a modern ghost must be diligent about ignoring calls, texts, emails, messages, pokes, prods'. Even with the most concerted efforts at disappearing, today's ghosters often fail to make themselves disappear completely. A plethora of other metaphoric verbs — orbiting, benching, submarining — describe how former flames with whom it is impossible to make contact still loom in our TikTok feeds and LinkedIn notifications. 'We have normalised the ubiquitous, ongoing half-lives of voices long gone, faces long vanished and thoughts long ceased.'
Other kinds of ghosting — familial, platonic, professional, social — find a place in Pettman's guide too, each becoming increasingly common in 'our age of ever-loosening social ties'. From the 'deadbeat dad who abandons his family' — historical examples include Charles Dickens, Albert Einstein and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 'who convinced his wife to abandon all five of their children at a foundling facility in Paris' — to companies failing to send follow-up emails after job interviews and friends who, while never actively breaking away, reduce their effort to the bare minimum, replying to messages 'belatedly, dutifully and perhaps even a little resentfully'.
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Pettman tries hard to be literary. Sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesn't. He describes the pain of getting ghosted, for example, as being 'washed ashore on the melancholy sands of our own solitude', which I could have done without. But he does seem to have a sense of humour, which ties the book together. His list of just about acceptable reasons for ghosting someone includes 'listening to Joe Rogan, admiring Elon Musk, or discussing the finer details of bitcoin' and among his conclusions about what is to be done about it is a 'global seance'. An eclectic series of case studies manages to incorporate both the Sex and the City TV series, specifically when Carrie gets dumped via Post-it Note, and the much misquoted Margaret Thatcher speech that 'there is no such thing as society', which he boldly claims 'inaugurated' our brutal culture of withdrawing without explanation.
The most worthwhile parts of this study of ghosting are where Pettman gets specific about why ghosting is, and has always been, such a cruel act — the ghoster escapes 'with the entire relationship rolled up under their arm', leaving no tangible marker that the pair of you ever knew each other, no permanent proof 'locked on the railings of picturesque European bridges'. Ghosting, he argues, is 'a form of auto-gaslighting, as you begin to entertain the dreadful possibility that you simply invented an imaginary companion, even as a fully fledged adult'. I know I'm not the only one who will be glad someone finally put that strange feeling into words.
Ghosting: On Disappearance by Dominic Pettman (Polity £12.99 pp110). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members