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Technology is neither good or bad; nor is it neutral.
Considering that the Internet and other forms of virtual communication have been in place for over 20 years now, surprisingly little has been written in psychoanalytical literature about their impact on psychic structure or the use of new technologies in the analytic setting with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Ermann, 2004; Carlino, 2010; Lingiardi, 2008; Dini, 2009; Bonaminio, 2010; Fiorentini, 2012; Kilborne, 2011; Lemma and Caparrotta, 2014).
We cannot escape that this generation is growing up in a network culture where communication is mediated and digital connectivity along with different strands of virtuality are now an integral part of our quotidian practices. Global networks impact on identity formation: groups of individuals now organize and validate their experience as a community virtually.
Let me put some of this into a broader context to underline the magnitude of what we have to understand. It is estimated that 38% of Internet users throughout the world use Facebook. If you consider this in relation to our estimated 7 billion world population, Facebook represents 12% of it. In other words if Facebook were a nation it would be the third largest in the world (Law, 2013).
Today I want to suggest to you that the transition from an industrial economy to an information economy impacts not just the external structure of society and commerce, but also internal psychic economies (Guignard, 2014), our brains (Greenfield, 2014) and, of course, how we conceptualize the analytic setting. I will not, however, focus on any of this today.