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In his recently published essay in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, “Reality 2.0: When Loss Is Lost,” Stephen Hartman (2011) argues that cyberspace is creating a shift in how we experience and understand reality. Here Steven Botticelli interviews him about his provocative thesis.
SB: In your essay, you make the provocative argument that the kinds of experiences available through the Internet challenge some of our traditional psychoanalytic ideas about the acceptance of loss as a necessary condition for the development of self and a sense of reality.
SH: Thanks for this opportunity to elaborate on my ideas about Reality 2.0. In three recent papers, I've been arguing that a paradigm shift is taking place in the culture at large. More specifically, I argue that the Internet is changing the way we experience reality. If Reality 1.0 hinges on accepting loss and limit, Reality 2.0 unfolds through access and search. Critics of the Internet write that this facilitates all manner of narcissistic evils: grandiosity; hypersexuality; disavowal of the difference between presence and absence; disembodiment. All of these arguments prioritize loss as the benchmark of authentic experience and disregard the relational potential of search.
Just last week, there was a story in the New York Times reporting findings by cognitive psychologists that attest to subtle changes in the way that mnemonic functions are being structured in response to Internet use. Likewise, almost daily, there are incidents of crimes solved, battles called, silences unmuzzled, and new forms of access to knowledge that stream from the Internet to the media to rapid uptake in the general population. It sounds like this: “Did you hear that you can make international calls for free on Viber?” Next thing you know, your patients are talking about daily conversations with people in Melbourne.
It used to be that when a person traveled far afield, they said good-bye for a while. Remember the Elton John song, “Daniel,” from the 1970s