This article contextualizes contemporary forms of digital ghosting by examining how two of its historical precursors—Victorian calling culture and answering machines—have been represented in North American women’s magazines. To do so, we develop mediated avoidance as an analytical heuristic. This concept captures the material, relational and social dimensions of a set of understudied media practices that seek to strategically engage with the gaps that are inherent in all communication, to defer, deflect, or disrupt mediated connections. Representations of mediated avoidance from respective eras were found to reflect different anxieties over the management of the public/private divide. Calling culture relied on unpaid labor to facilitate the transmission of printed messages between bourgeoise women and was constrained by an array of social protocols that regulated interactions along conceptions of propriety. The disconnective features of answering machines, meanwhile, were represented as giving women the upper hand in courtship, as well as providing means for increased productivity and self-care, foreshadowing contemporary justifications of digital disconnection. Concerns over contemporary ghosting are discussed as produced by a spillage of media practices. Ghosting is considered acceptable in feminine-coded spheres like courtship. But it is viewed as inappropriate—sometimes even as signaling a broader social crisis—when it bleeds into other contexts, like when an employee ghosts their employer.

中文翻译：

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成为幽灵：迈向幽灵的媒体历史


本文通过研究数字重影的两个历史先驱——维多利亚时代的呼叫文化和答录机——如何在北美女性杂志中得到体现，将当代形式的数字重影置于背景中。为此，我们将中介回避开发为一种分析启发式方法。这个概念捕捉了一组未被充分研究的媒体实践的物质、关系和社会维度，这些实践试图战略性地参与所有沟通中固有的差距，以推迟、转移或破坏中介联系。研究发现，各个时代的中介回避的表现反映了对公共/私人鸿沟管理的不同焦虑。呼唤文化依靠无偿劳动来促进资产阶级女性之间印刷信息的传递，并受到一系列社会协议的约束，这些协议根据礼仪概念规范互动。与此同时，答录机的断开连接功能被描述为让女性在求爱中占据上风，以及提供提高生产力和自我保健的手段，预示着数字断开连接的当代理由。对当代幽灵的担忧被讨论为由媒体实践的溢出所产生。在求爱等女性编码的领域中，重影被认为是可以接受的。但是，当它渗透到其他环境中时，例如当员工对雇主不满时，它被视为不合适——有时甚至预示着更广泛的社会危机。