Speaking Into the iPhone: An Interview With John Durham Peters, or, Ghostly Cessation for the Digital Age

Conducted by media scholar, Carolyn L. Kane, this interview was recorded on Saturday morning of April 25, 2009, in an empty classroom at MIT, during the MIT6 Media in Transition conference, using Ms. Kane’s iPhone. The morning before, John Durham Peters gave his lecture, “What Ever Happened to Loneliness?” The interview also occurs in honor of the 10th anniversary of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, a text that bridges European, Canadian, and American communications scholarship within an intellectual framework of lost loves and uncanny ghosts. This 2009 interview extends the discussion to more recent issues of loneliness in light of social networking technologies, critical methods, and coping strategies for the information age, the ghosts of digital media, and the present, past, and future of media studies and archiving in the United States.