The Haunted Broadcast: Using Static to Understand Broadcast’s History and Present

Broadcast static—interference, visual snow or noise—has been a critical part of media history. Typically signaling a breakdown in communication, representation of static has persisted in cinematic and televisual content. Despite static’s ubiquity throughout broadcast media history, it remains an underexamined object of study. In this paper, I turn to two examples of how static is used as a narrative, rhetorical or esthetic device—as a way to explore new technologies to a parallel world ( Poltergeist and From ), and as a means to access and rework the past ( The Ring and Archive 81 ). Drawing upon media histories of hauntings, these examples demonstrate how static offers a temporal gateway between the present, past, and future. I argue that static is a useful framework through which to understand technological change and failure and show how audiences have been active in reading not only texts but broadcast technologies themselves.