Young people in France and their uses of computer: a potential space? (original) (raw)
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Young People in France and Their Uses of Computers: A Potential Space?
2010
Abstract: This paper looks at the potential space hypothesis: and asks whether domestic multimedia spaces might also be considered as transitional spaces in which the identity of each person is played, replayed and rebuilt? A psychoanalytic orientated methodology is first presented ...
ISPSO 2007 : Potential space as a source of creativity and terrifying anxiety, 2007
This text is made up of two sections. The first one looks at the hypothesis of the "second self" put forward by Turkle (1984). On the basis of our empirical material, can we talk about an "online" second self or a more or less antagonistic "on-screen" second self with our "original" self? The second part of the text will look at the potential space hypothesis: what is it about the domestic multimedia spaces that we looked at that are also transitional spaces in which the physical identity of each person is played, replayed and rebuilt? These two sections are an implicit series of theoretical preoccupations: does the "subject" build himself in the virtual world or not? Is it necessary to deconstruct the subject? On the contrary, should we deconstruct sociological, psychological and psychoanalytical analysis categories in order to find out more about multimedia culture? Without having a successfully completed form and by performing psychoanalysis, these theoretical reflections are eager to contribute towards achieving a deeper understanding of how ICT's (Information and Communication Technologies) are used.
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...
Youth in the Digital World: Dispositions and Experiences of Internet Use
Young People in Complex and Unequal Societies, 2022
The aim of this chapter is to understand young people's experiences in the use of digital technologies, taking into account the entanglement between online and offline spheres of activity in contemporary societies. From a qualitative sample of 30 in-depth interviews among young people in the region of Madrid, we describe the main dispositions embodied thru the process of incorporation of digital technologies into ordinary practice. Such dispositions are produced in a digitally mediated context in which the following ambivalences, engendered by information society, are present: (1) spatiality (distance vs proximity); (2) temporality (immediacy vs continuous connection); (3) techno-dependency (freedom vs necessity); (4) competency (confidence vs defenselessness); (5) connectivity (hyper-connection vs isolation); (6) presence (privacy vs exposition). Thus, we conclude that young people live in a digitally mediated society in which the opportunities (extended freedom and agency) and drawbacks (saturation, dependency, lack or privacy) are generally entangled in their ordinary practice. Delving into particular forms of technological appropriation is mandatory to find the common patterns that structure young perceptions and experiences in the overwhelming, massive and volatile landscape that is information society.
Digital Media, Psychoanalysis and the Subject (Special Issue)
CM - Communication and Media, 2016
Under the title Digital Media, Psychoanalysis and the Subject, this special issue of CM: Communication and Media seeks to reassess and reinvigorate psychoanalytic thinking in media and communication studies. We undertake this reassessment with a particular focus on the question of what psychoanalytic concepts, theories as well as modes of inquiry can contribute to the study of digital media. Overlooking the field of media and communication studies, we argue that psychoanalysis offers a reservoir of conceptual and methodological tools that has not been sufficiently tapped. In particular, psychoanalytic perspectives offer a heightened concern and sensibility for the unconscious, i.e. the element in human relating and relatedness that criss-crosses and mars our best laid plans and reasonable predictions. This introduction provides an insight into psychoanalysis as a discipline, indicates the ways in which it has been adopted in media research in general and research into digital media in particular and, ultimately, points to its future potential to contribute to the field.
On the Importance of Netnographic Research in Understanding Young People's Virtual/Real Lives
ARTICLE, 2019
The digital age, which has began in earnest with the widespread use of the Internet, is an era of an unprecedented technological advancement in all fields. Triggered by the radical changes brought by this advancement, scholars in the humanities started to investigate the prolific use of technology in all aspects of human activity. In fact, a myriad of researches studying the human interactions with and through new technologies has escalated, and new theorizations aiming at redefining humanity in the digital age were developed. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg theory (1991), for instance, proposes an imaginary world of fusions between animal and machine while Rosi Braidotti’s the Posthuman Project (2012) explains that in the era of advanced postmodernity, the notion of ‘the human’ is re-defined and de-stabilized by technologically mediated social relations in a globally connected world. By putting emphasis on the deeply-rooted changes that are happening to humanity at a high pace, the present paper reflects on new directions in the humanities. More precisely, my focus is to consider how Robert Kozinets’ netnography, as an emerging research method in digital anthropology, can help adults to understand the double life young people are leading. While accentuating the strong impact spending long hours online have on youngsters’ social behavior, I suggest that netnographers could assist teachers and parents in comprehending young people’s disruptive behavior by explaining to them the many changes that occur in youngsters’ comportment because of a process of virtualization.
Pensamiento Educativo: Revista de Investigación Educacional Latinoamericana, 2020
This paper presents partial results from a research centered on children's social inclusion/ exclusion processes in a marginalized school of Santiago de Chile. We realized an interpretative and visual school ethnography, focused on a 4th grade. The data produced are journal diaries (observations and ethnographic interviews); children's visual productions (photographs and drawings); and children's group interviews transcriptions. These data reveal the centrality of the virtual universe and the digital references in children's experiences and in their subjectivations. The digital culture would extend the field of real for children, allowing them to subjectivize and produce new knowledges. It appears as a medium to deploy the virtual experience, a "transitional object" that enables to connect the internal world with the external world. The virtual space seems fundamental for children's subjectivations and should not be considered as a negative or threatening aspect for school, rather as a potential space to bring the children to school knowledges. This depends on its exclusive mediation by digital technologies or its mediation by the other adult, through the inclusion of virtuality-digital as no digital-in the intermediate space of communication.
Ideas of Childhood and Digital Technology in the Information Age
This is a full text of my thesis, submitted in 2006. The thesis begins by arguing that the mid 1990s witnessed a proliferation of popular, political and academic discourses of childhood and technology, which characterised children as ‘digital natives’ and which presented children’s seemingly natural facility with digital technology use as heralding the potential for new relationships between children and adults. In order to understand the implications of these representations, the thesis: 1. Conducts a review of the literature of childhood studies, and of childhood in the context of new formations characterised as the ‘information society’; 2. Examines the relationship between language and society, exploring specifically the concepts of ‘hegemony, articulation, recontextualisation, and appropriation/colonisation’ drawn from Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, Bernstein and Hall’s analyses of the role of discourse in political and social change; and 3. Develops a metholodology based upon Critical Discourse Analysis, in order to provide an account of the relationship between discursive representations of childhood and the social practices and institutions in which these representations are enacted or resisted. The data analysed in the thesis comprise: 1. New Labour political speeches between 1996 and 2001, focusing specifically upon Tony Blair’s speeches and upon the chain of texts linking Blair’s 1996 conference speech, the Stevenson Report and the National Grid for Learning 2. 997 newspaper articles from the years 1997 and 2001, analysed through both a corpus analysis and detailed textual analysis of selected articles 3. 5 Interviews with 6 families in the home conducted between 1998 and 2000 On the basis of this analysis, the thesis contends that, while children were repesented as having significant agency and ‘natural affinity’ with digital technologies in this period (representations which did challenge traditional adult-child relations of the ‘dominant framework’) this new form of agency was colonised within wider educational policy to act as a warrant for a ‘personalisation’ of educational provision and a de-articulation of childhood from the institutions of home and school. This process of colonisation serves to obscure the differences in resources available to different children in achieving agency in the context of the ‘information age’, and serves to create equivalences between different social groupings acting with very different political and social agendas.
Becoming Digital, Becoming Child: The Production of Pleasure in a Post- Cinematic World
This paper explores the relationship between the digital desiring subject of our time and his/her digital (sexual) gadgets as a fundamentally infantile and ritualized way of managing the death drive. The paper recognizes the 21st century as a post-cinematic era in which the subject's relationship to media coincides with his/her relationship to desire: perennially excessive, marred by anxiety, and difficult to articulate. It also suggests, through a close reading of the movement of images in online sexual economies that despite the widely available technology of moving images, the digital subject chooses the still image as a mode of representation over the too-revealing movement of the moving image in his/her transactions of desire-which may or may not amount to a physical encounter, though it certainly produces endless, and endlessly deferred, impressions of its possibility. Like a masturbatory prosthesis capable of turning the supposed continuity of time (in which each instant dies to give way to the next) into the circular repetition of the neurotic (in which each time feels like the first time), the digital serves as world-making device for the subject to stage old modes of being that feel very new, and newer at each repetition. The still image traps or seizes that which the moving image lets out or leaks much in the same way the notion of the category contains, or maims, the chaotic/oceanic/excessive queerness of Desire.