The Haunted Network: Shakespeare’s Digital Ghost

Abstract

The figure of William Shakespeare is a socially iterated paradigm, reinvented by different societies at different times as a popular construction of culturally sourced ideas of Shakespeare, nominally linked to the man from Stratford and instead reflective of the eras that created them. It is therefore unsurprising that Shakespeare enjoys a prolific afterlife on social networking platforms. These feeds contribute to Shakespeare’s digital ghost, a construct of Shakespeare created via digital platforms by modern curators and users. The digital ghost is a product of a massive Shakespeare network—the culmination of hundreds of years of history transposed to the digital sphere and focused through one character. Examining Twitter’s @Shakespeare and Facebook’s “William Shakespere,” the chapter explicates the concept of digital ghosting as it relates to Shakespeare and his modern user base.