WTF does "Haunted Screens" mean?

Why does a blog about culture, technology and the Wired world have a name like this?

Part of the explanation is fairly obvious. I live in a world of screens: on LCDs, smartphones, TVs, iPods, and GPS devices. But above all, computer screens. I stare at one all day (several, actually) and part of the night. The Wired world lives in screens.

But there's a personal connection, too. As a kid, I watched more TV than anyone on the planet. Later I was movie mad. I saw everything. (Yes, mad. I saw Dirty Dozen at the Colony Theater in White Plains seven times during its first run, and I had to take a bus to get there each time.) After college, I worked as a film editor and made documentaries. I moved to L.A. and wrote screenplays. And with some of the money from the sale of my first feature script, I bought a first generation Mac. One screen leads to another.

Okay, so why haunted screens?

The simplest explanation is that I once directed a documentary film about a film critic, a movie about movies. The critic was Lotte Eisner and she wrote a book called The Haunted Screen. Her title referred to something very specific (German expressionist film in the 20s) but for me the phrase resonated much more broadly. Especially now.

We think of the Web as a live medium, a mirror of the present, even the future. But just because it's only 5,000 days old (to use Kevin Kelly's succinct formulation), don't be fooled into thinking the Web will be young for ever. It feels like a vast, crackling communications medium. But it's really about storage. It's a universal archive, growing exponentially every day, and pretty soon, all that will be left of the people who made today's blogs and pages and records and emails ... will be their blogs and pages and records and emails.

The ratio of past to present is growing. The online world is becoming a palimpsest, a future archaeological site. The screens we sit in front of are time machines populated by ghosts.

By way of final comment, here's that Nokia ad from last year, called The Fourth Screen:

Comments

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