Verified by 
Photo by Andrew Todd Phillips
Do you get a shot of angst before pressing the SEND button on a text, email or blog post? Is there an anxiety app running in your head as you submit your words to cyberspace? Am I sending to the right person? Have I made any Freudian slips? How does my personal identity translate into text?
Whether you're sending to a group or individual, digital technology remakes the interpersonal encounter. Sherry Turkle, MIT expert on computers and human relations, researches the role of texting in the lives of adolescents. She makes a few suggestions for parents, but I think they apply to enhanced living for all:
1. No texting in sacred spaces such as the kitchen, bedroom, church or temple. Addendum: no texting in the car not only for reasons of safety, but also in the interest of preserving our skills of conversation.
2. Keep alive the art of conversation. When you're with your kids, talk with them. Don't be like the mother who bottle-feeds her baby while on her blackberry. Psychic multitasking doesn't pay. Be with your kids totally for some part of the day or week, giving them devoted attention.
3. Sustain the skill of writing in homework and letters, using real words rather than net lingo. Abbreviations that developed with chat and text shorthand don't cut it in a term paper.
4. Take Internet sabbaticals. Set aside a day or portion of the day when you turn the power button off your cell phone, laptop, and all digital devices.
Before the web, there was the invention of the printing press, radio, television -- technological innovations that also created upheavals in the way people relate. Communication revolutions spark psychosocial ones.
In-person exchanges or those over the phone give us nonverbal cues, facial expression, tone of voice, hesitations, associative richness -- more a feel for the thought process. In texting or email we use words predominantly, although these correspondences also include photos, YouTube videos, various hyperlinks -- becoming, at times, a multimedia collage of conversation. For the most part, however, computer communications utilize emotional editing, what Freud called "secondary revision." The material is not raw, but rewritten. Many reread before clicking the SEND button.
Iphone Art, by New Media artist Pedro Goico
Digital devices influence the way we come to know ourselves as different from others. They effect separation and individuation processes. Now that I have this gadget constantly in my pocket with instantaneous access to other people -- I don't feel so alone. "No!" to the silence of the existential abyss.
My iPhone simulates a personal relationship through its touch screen, good-looking graphics and script, and the sensual aesthetic that Steve Jobs executed so well. I think of it like this: Jobs digitized the "good-enough mother," the loving and attentive caregiver that perhaps the visionary, himself, missed in early life.
New communication technologies soothe our anxieties even while they exacerbate them in countless other ways. They defend against our solitude. We are all potentially connected. And, certainly, use of the Internet has helped bring people together in vital movements of social change such as the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street (the subject of a future post).
Yet Turkle argues that this notion of "togetherness" is half-baked, at least for teenagers. Digital technologies, notably texting by adolescents, compromise psychical development. Texting encourages a behavior that makes kids growing-up into partial selves. Before they think or feel, teenagers text: 6000-8000 messages a month on average. They use others in the constitution of their thoughts, emotions, and sense of self. Turkle claims the feeling becomes part of the texting process. "I think, therefore I am" becomes "I share, therefore I am." In this way, cell phones act as a psychological prosthetic.
Selfobjects are things or people that complete the self, that function as part of the self rather than being understood as independent and distinct. This experience derives from the earliest interactions between a child and its caretaker before the infant realizes that the person feeding and caring for them is actually another human being. With smartphones, etc., we avoid separtion and the feelings of ambivalence that go along with it. We sidestep the "good-byes" of conversations that we used to have over the phone and just Sign Off, or text "::poof::"
The Internet is a baby and we need to bring it up smartly. Digital media offer us the opportunity of redefining our values, of rethinking intimacy, solitude, selfhood, our sense of time and threshold for frustration. With texting and email, people often expect a short, fast response. Turkle says next time you get an email simply reply "I'm thinking" or, perhaps its psychic companion "I'm feeling."
______________________
References:
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other, Basic Books, 2011.
"Remembering, Retweeting and Working Through: Psychosocial Perspectives on Social Media," Erikson Institute for Education and Research, Austen Riggs Center, 10/15-16, Stockbridge, MA.
Follow me: http://www.twitter.com/mollycastelloe
