Digital Lives (original) (raw)
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CM: Communication and Media, 2016
This is the first-ever special issue of a media and communication journal that addresses questions of subjectivity, digital media and the Internet with a focus on psychoanalytic theory. The contributing authors seek to reassess and reinvigorate psychoanalytic thinking in media and communication studies. They undertake this reassessment with a particular focus on the question of what psychoanalytic concepts, theories and modes of inquiry can contribute to the study of contemporary digital media. The collection features a broad range of psychoanalytic approaches - from Freudian, via Kleinian and relational, to Lacanian and Jungian - and covers a wide range of issues - from the uses (and abuses) of the mobile phone and other digital devices, the circulation of traumatising images and anxiety-inducing tracking apps, via hysteric feminist discourses, digital fetishes and the exploitation of YouTube celebrities, to the meaning of the gangbang in a priapistic media culture and this culture's emptying-out of meaning towards its climax in a cosmic spasm...
THE DESTINY OF THE VIRTUAL IN ADOLESCENCE
How might we explain the attraction of adolescents or of young adults to digital worlds and, particularly, the privileged use of new types of communication by distance that have been made possible by the evolution of technology? In this paper we seek to explain the important investment of adolescents in these new practices from a psychoanalytical point of view. To this end, we review the central issues of the adolescent process by comparing them to the characteristics of a game that is a significant example of virtual worlds, the online role-playing games. Based on the use of these games, our hypothesis suggests that the privileged choice of the virtual world could be related to the psychological work which characterises the adolescence process, especially in terms of narcissistic shoring up.
Addiction to cyberspace: virtual reality gives analysts pause for the modern psyche
International Journal of Jungian Studies, 2018
Analysts have been concerned for decades about the unforeseen psychological impacts of technology. The rapid developments during the past 15 years have brought issues related to cyberspace front and center in analysis and psychotherapy. A specific question arises: what is happening to our capacity for relating openly? We now regularly see “screen time” being used 1) defensively to retreat and escape, 2) compulsively to gratify urges and impulses, and 3) addictively to quench emotional cravings. Problems with limits and recognition of separation confound the positive aspects of cyberspace. Vulnerable egos may not even realize when escapism turns into addiction. Soul can become lost in these activities, when relationships are instead transactional and technology is regarded as numinous. A case example from the author’s practice and another from the media highlight the great risks for soul in this realm of cyberspace.
Sexuality and cyberporn: Towards a new agenda for research
Sexuality and Culture, 2002
This article presents theoretical considerations based on cultural analysis approaches to studying pornography and sexuality as a means of starting to suggest a new agenda for cyberporn research. By bringing to the forefront concepts of how subjectivity and sexuality are produced within the computer/Internet apparatus, I hope to diversify the focus in cyberporn research away from social science approaches and pre-Foucaultian assumptions of the subject which obscure understandings of new media and cyberporn use. Through a summary of visual culture studies and reception studies of pornography, I argue that cyberporn must be understood as contingent within the encoding and decoding processes and discourses of sexuality (Foucault) in which it is produced and consumed. My focus here is the home office/terminal as the site of reception/cyberporn use. While there is potential for a great variety of cultural analytic approaches to the study of cyberporn and how new media use influences sexuality, I end with specific suggestions for researching cyberporn reception in the home.
Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres
Journal of digital social research, 2022
Gender, sexuality and embodiment in digital spheres have been increasingly studied from various critical perspectives: From research highlighting the articulation of intimacies, desires, and sexualities in and through digital spaces to theoretical explorations of materiality in the digital realm. With such a high level of (inter)disciplinarity, theories, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in relation to digital spheres have become highly diversified. Aiming to reflect this diversity, this special issue brings together innovative and newly developed theoretical, empirical, analytical, and critical approaches in the study of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. By connecting intersectionality and digitality to one another, it adopts an integrated approach that reflects the intricacy and interconnectedness of social categories and markers of difference, privilege, performance, and discrimination. The contributions explore a range of differently situated digital cultural practices, including intimate and sexual experiences with(in) digital media, online self-presentation, expressions of digital resistance, and forms of backlash and online attacks. What connects all these articles, is their critical approach to intersectional inequalities and privileges in relation to digitality, plus their nuanced perspective on gender, sexuality, and embodiment interferentially. The final article is based on a roundtable discussion and aims to encourage interdisciplinary connections and suggests ways of doing research that builds bridges between academia and activism.
Adolescents, digital media and romantic relationship
Digital media are an important part of adolescents' everyday life who use these platforms not only to increase their knowledge, but also to enlarge their social network that they construct outside digital spaces. Through the social network sites and the mobile media, the internet becomes the place where to speak about emotions, to play with them, to write about ourselves, to flirt, to define and redefine the seduction practices and the expectatives about the others: a potential partner or a friend. This paper presents and discusses the results of a sociological research. The work involved fifty-eight Italian boys and girls from the age of sixteen to the age of eighteen. Passing through the digital and fiscal spaces with the help of the youth who took part in my research I tried to explore the role of the digital media in the online and offline dynamics connected to affectivity and love.