Where Did Everybody Go?
By Tara Isabella Burton By Dominic Pettman Polity, 144 pages, $16.95 Ms. Burton is the author of five books, including the novel “Here in Avalon.”
The Wall Street Journal
Oct 31, 2025
On April 3, 2007, a Twitter user going by “Vonster” coined a term that has become commonplace in modern cultural life. “Just now realized,” Vonster posted, discussing his plans with another user, “I ghosted Gedeon on our interview? Doh!” Vonster’s ghosting—a mere failure to appear where or when he said he would—would become a byword for all forms of social disappearance. “Ghosting” is used in particular to indicate one’s absence from the digital realms where maintaining perpetual contact—by text, by email, by phone or direct message—is now both possible and expected.
Ghosting, as a phenomenon of the digital age, is a nearrequisite part of the app-based dating experience (this writer has indeed been ghosted more than once). It is increasingly common, too, in the post-pandemic workplace. An employer might renege on a job offer; an employee might simply not turn up.
Plenty of reasons have been presented to explain why this silent, sometimes mysterious way of ending a conversation or a relationship seems ubiquitous now: our weakening sense of social obligations; the decline of shared responsibility that makes simply vanishing a legitimate expression of one’s disinterest. But Dominic Pettman’s intriguing, if at times uneven, “Ghosting” provides us with a promising new framework through which to view what he treats as a historically rooted but technologically specific practice.
For Mr. Pettman, a professor of media studies and the humanities at the New School in New York City, ghosting is as much about presence—the way the digital revolution has allowed people to exist as avatars in our shared imaginative and linguistic spaces—as it is about absence. Ghosting can happen, in part, because we otherwise expect people to be available to us around the clock. The interstitial world of texts, emails and social-media photographs, neither fully part of the material world nor fully within our own minds, acts as a kind of exteriorized collective imagination.
“We are,” Mr. Pettman reminds us, “surrounded by ghosts already, and we’ve invented new types of mediated haunting that are, oddly, more comforting than unnerving. We have introduced a new immaterial, spectral dimension into our affairs.” The appeal of ghosting may be inseparable from the question of what—if anything—of us truly exists in the in-between spaces that information technology makes possible.
Ghosting is uncanny not only because it deprives us of certain codified social rituals for disentangling our relationships. It’s uncanny, Mr. Pettman claims, because the uncertainty about presence, in the digital age, is linked to our anxieties about death: the final disentangling of our informational and physical selves. At one point in “Ghosting,” Mr. Pettman cites Marcel Proust, who through his fiction became one of the most influential theorists of the interplay of imagination, memory and reality. The narrator of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (1913-27) hears his grandmother’s voice on the then-novel telephone, and marvels that “it is she, it is her voice that is speaking . . . but how remote it is! . . . a real presence indeed that voice so near . . . a premonition also of an eternal separation!”
Yet Mr. Pettman spends curiously little time on the experience of the ghoster of the digital age. Regardless of the ethical and interpersonal implications, how does it feel to opt out of this kind of always-on presence and choose such invisibility? Why might we hunger for, and fear, the very freedom that generations before us took for granted: to be visible only when others can directly see us?
Not all of “Ghosting” satisfies. Mr. Pettman’s primary exploration is so intriguing—and tightly argued—that excursions into, say, family abandonment, or the author’s own experience of being professionally ghosted by a university department, feel perfunctory: They fill out the page count but don’t expand on the book’s most interesting ideas. Mr. Pettman is at his best when he tightens his focus on what one might think of as the erotic: the interplay of real others with our imagined projections, an interplay that governs the vicissitudes of human desire.
The most chilling—and exciting—idea in “Ghosting” is the suggestion that nobody else was ever really present in the first place. It is in our imagination, after all, that our long-desired futures appear: marriage to a man with whom one has only had one date; happiness and success in a job one may never hold. Other people are already, in some sense, absent—existing only in our mental perception or, these days, in the numinous world of our extended digital consciousness. It can be tempting to wonder, at times: Am I the only living being in a world of ghosts?
The questions underlying this fundamental tension remain unanswered here. Nor does Mr. Pettman give us a detailed account of what we ought to do about it. When it comes to presence, what do we, in fact, owe to one another? Are we destined to be perpetual ghosts in someone else’s life? “No-one owes anyone their ongoing presence,” the author tells us, almost in passing, but doesn’t convince us of why.
Mr. Pettman’s conclusion is that the answer lies in “striking the right balance and having the right instincts.” Fair enough. But his analysis of the haunted nature of our world is compelling enough to make us hunger for an equally haunting conclusion.
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