Browser as scrying tool?

One of the areas I've been particularly interested in when thinking about Forteana 2.0, is the idea that the Internet is haunted, and that the clients we use, our browsers, IM softwares, IRC clients etc., might be thought of as crystal balls, or Ouija boards.

It's the sense of the 'over there' which brings to life the idea of the internet as a digital afterlife, a space filled with disembodied voices, presence and memory.

It's an idea picked up on by Jeffrey Sconce in his book 'Haunted Media', and one which I wrote about in Digital Me, an MA project I recently completed.

While the notion is metaphorical, I think the increasing use of technology in Paranormal investigation inevitably leads us to the idea of scrying online, an idea which is increasingly developed through popular culture - through films like The Ring, Phone, and more directly Internet related, Pulse.

An early example of computer scrying is The Vertical Plane by Ken Webster. Now out of print, it describes communications between Webster and a character called 'Tomas', seemingly sharing the same space across a divide of hundreds of years... Like some godawful movie with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, but with computers.