Hill, Annette. Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture

Abstract

Hill, Annette. Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. 224 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-415-54463-4. $39.95. Annette Hill opens her accessible and wide-ranging "popular culture ethnography of the paranormal" (12) with the assertion that since the second millennium, British and American popular culture domains have undergone a "paranormal turn" (1). In this shift, audiences, battered by individual and/ or national traumas and motivated by consumption and lifestyle trends rather than religious beliefs, engage with interactive media in search of "experiences that they believe go beyond reality" (13). In the mainstream paranormal popular culture that Hill explores, personal experience is in and of itself evidence of the unknown, even as the absence of extraordinary events is one of the most prominent feature of paranormal media (77-81). In this space of anticipation and possibility, audiences collaborate with each other and with various forms of communication (online, on television, on stage, and in person) to produce their understanding of the extra-ordinary, the disquieting, and the inexplicable. For Hill, the performative relationship required of participants in paranormal domains inspires audience reflexivity about the meaning and value of experience, a reflexivity that she emulates in this analysis of paranormal media texts and their reception. Hill positions Paranormal Media within a spectrum of previous scholarship on the social history of ghosts and haunting/haunted places (e.g., Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters and Owen Davies's The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts), as well as cultural analyses dedicated to deciphering metaphors of fragmentation and disembodiment rife in contemporary paranormal technologies (e.g., Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media and Marina Warner's Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century). Within the book, she orders her nine chapters in a progression of ethnographic encounters from the private/individual (e.g., "Armchair Ghost Hunters," "Psychic Tourists") to public/group (e.g., "Beyond Magic," "The Audience is the Show") experiences of popular culture. Throughout ethnographies that evolve from the personal to the communal, Hill interweaves features of the contemporary paranormal turn with its late nineteenth-century predecessor. These strategies not only place history and nostalgia at the center of a range of contemporary paranormal audience practices, but also reinvigorates the duality of the term "medium" as a reference to individuals who claim they can communicate with the world beyond our reality and also the technological means by which communication is transmitted between "spirit talkers" and their audiences (25). The link between paranormal conceptions of reality, the unknown, and the immaterial and the translation of those conceptions into representational practices (whether on stage, on screen, or in everyday life) reinforces Hill's claim that this "neglected area of research" in media studies deserves scholarly attention (13). Hill's previous books have focused on reality television, and she is particularly skilled in merging discourse analysis with ethnographic methodology to produce a "whole lives" approach to audience studies (168). Throughout this particular text, Hill forestalls any conception of paranormal media audiences as victims of false consciousness, even as she remains cognizant of the market's role, eager to turn "paranormal beliefs into revenue streams" (187). While she reserves her thickest description of the paranormal field for her historical sources (while we are taken into the field, Hill's is not an ethnography that allows readers a chance to experience the sensory nuances of the ghost tour or magic show), Hill demonstrates great respect and critical attention to the voices of her interviewees and focus group participants. By integrating their personal experiences and characterizations of paranormal media into her carefully structured social and cultural history and discursive analysis, Hill paints a picture of audiences who deftly manage "a web of personal, emotional, psychological and physical connections and contradictions" (169). …