“Looking at us” vs. “As We Seem.” Reflections on the Impact of the Virtual World on the Subjectivity of Our Adolescents and Young People

The sense of self-constructed and maintained intersubjectively becomes a “sense of identity” in a bonding and social context. In this register, a representation is configured, both experiential and virtual, currently enormously amplified by the multiple channels of images that we can offer others and images that others offer us at multiple levels of the current virtual world. Teenagers and young people meet, play, and “relate” mainly online, not in an interpersonal exchange. Can anyone be a person in an environment devastated by virtualization? Immersion in virtual worlds has been carried out to avoid the experience of mental pain in the face of loneliness or failures of omnipotence. Young people seeking connection with others through technological means or through immersing themselves in virtual worlds are trying to reduce or cancel that mental pain. Within this virtual space, between the formative and the transformative, buried personal experiences are accessed and lived, perhaps to preserve them for a future encounter. They are “unlived potentialities” that could be lived. We need direct intersubjective feedback, which includes an empathic connection that resonates both with me and the other. What we seem is not enough. If our adolescents are seeking the real encounter, and if it does not arrive, the virtual will be able to fill the “as if” need, but it will not be enough for a mature subjectivity.