Ghosting

By Dominic Pettman | Translated by Choi Ri-oe | Dongnyeok | 200 pages | 16,800 KRW

What is the worst way to be told by a lover that it is over? If, after a huge fight, you hear that it is time to break up, emotions may surge in the moment, but as time passes it might be tidily settled. If you part ways in a tedious fizzle after a long spell of boredom, it may come to mind now and then, but the shock may not be that great.

If it is a ‘ghosting-style breakup’? KakaoTalk messages go unread, or even if they are read, there is no reply. The social media account is gone. It looks like a breakup, yet you cannot know for sure. It is impossible to understand why the other person is acting this way. All you can do is sift through recent signs and the long-running feelings one by one. Did I make a mistake? Did I fail to read the implicit messages my partner sent? In a purgatory-like state, self-reproach continues. You also suffer the torture of ‘hope’ that things could start again. The pain of separation lingers for a long time.

Dominic Pettman, Chair Professor of Media and New Humanities at The New School in New York, reflects on ‘ghosting,’ the sudden cutting off of contact. He sees ghosting as “withdrawing completely from family or friends without even leaving a proper explanation,” and as “a kind of symbolic suicide.” It is “a suicide that allows one to avoid the hassle of actually dying,” yet it can still “leave the same guilt, pain, and unresolved feelings as the real thing.” Abrupt communication breakdowns are not unique to our era, but Pettman argues that digital media environments such as social media and smartphones give them distinctive features. Just as traffic accidents emerged after the advent of the automobile, once text messaging appeared, even the act of not sending a text came to carry meaning.

Pettman classifies ghosting into three layers. First comes ‘romantic ghosting.’ Romantic ghosting today requires far more avoidance techniques than breakups of the past. Former lovers had only face-to-face meetings, letters, and phone calls, whereas today there are texts, email, DMs, and every other means of connection. In the past, to break up you needed at least enough courage to directly tell the other person that the heart had changed. In the age of ‘romantic ghosting,’ fleeing is enough. If you simply master the avoidance techniques spawned by a ‘late techno-imperialist culture,’ you can evade situations in which you must endure the other person looking stunned and the awkward time.

Of course, romantic ghosting can also be justified. When the other person is violent or untrustworthy, ghosting becomes a safe way to end a relationship. In such cases, ghosting is “a counter-practice in the gender war that always unfolds on the asymmetrical terrain of patriarchal courtship rituals.” While romantic ghosting should be evaluated differently depending on context, the author ultimately holds that the “paradox of the streaming age” applies to love as well. There is an abundance of things to watch, but it is hard to find anything worth immersing in. Skimming a dating app for a short time yields a running list of potential partners, yet it is difficult to form a serious relationship with any of them.

There is also ‘family and friendship ghosting.’ Stories of a father who abandoned his family and later emerged in the world as a great artista case of ‘family ghosting’existed in the past as well, but the patterns related in this book are a bit more contemporary. This relates to the fact that volatility in modern society is far greater than before. Unlike in earlier times, when many people lived their entire lives without leaving their hometowns, the social pressures that drive people into different places and situations are far stronger today. As society changes rapidly, relationships cannot remain the same. The social mesh has grown wider and thinner. The sitcom <Friends>, in which six friends live in the same house or nearby and meet at the same cafe every day, is already a tale from 30 years ago. The recent explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) apps helps people “consume the modes and styles of conversation, simulations of speaking and listening, without having to endure direct interaction with others.” The era of ‘friendship without friends’ has arrived.

If ‘romantic ghosting’ and ‘family and friendship ghosting’ could be viewed as social satire, ‘social ghosting’ is more serious. This is because it proves that ‘trust,’ the core asset of a community, is crumbling. At this point, Pettman expands the meaning of ghosting. He cites cases where someone prepared to change jobs after receiving an offer only for it to be canceled without explanation, a newly hired employee who does not show up for work for no reason, and even being ‘ghosted by places’ when a hometown has become unrecognizable due to redevelopment. Pettman holds that the seeds of occupational ghosting were sown in the 1990s, when welfare systems and social safety nets in advanced economies began to disappear one by one. After Margaret Thatcher declared that “there is no such thing as society,” relationships in the neoliberal era stopped being rooted in mutual trust and instead became interchangeable according to cost-benefit analysis. The world has now become “a hostile anthill where only divergent interests and competitive motives remain.” The “subtle yet pervasive abandonment of roles and responsibilities” has spread widely.

Ghosting is a problem because identity is formed within relationships with others. When one side of a relationship collapses, identity is also put at risk. Already anxious and fragile modern lives sway all the more violently with changes in relationships.

Tech power brokers are “busy creating subscription services for hologram ‘friends’ that simulate social connection.” The author closes the book with the line, “We need to figure out how to speak again with those who have left.”