Ghosts in the Medium: The Haunting of Heidegger‘s Technological Question

In an attempt to orient media ecology along a slightly different trajectory, this article expands the consideration of the medium by looking to its triple promise as a technology, a psychic medium, and in-between. This article blends together two seeming disparate case studies—Rudyard Kipling's early take on wireless telegraphy (today thought in terms of radio) and Martin Heidegger's discussion of language and technics—in order to demonstrate how media “haunt” many of our “discussions” of technology. Turning to Jacques Derrida, who has long been concerned with mediation, this article attempts to interrogate Heidegger on behalf of Kipling’s radio, in order to see how the medium upsets the basic binary of language/ technology, and to explore how mediation dissolves the philosophical presumption of presence. At the same time, this article argues that philosophers like Heidegger confront this dissolution with a rhetorical trick still popular today: the linking of past media ecologies to a more stable, more authentic spiritual component, a technostalgia that attempts to exorcize today's “ghosts in the medium.”