Human Virtuality And Digital Life

Winner of the Gradiva® Best Book Award 2022, and the Courage to Dream Book Prize 2023 from the Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association! This book is a psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of how the digital is transforming our perception of the world and our understanding of ourselves. Drawing on examples from everyday life, myth, and popular culture, this book argues that virtual reality is only the latest instantiation of the phenomenon of the virtual, which is intrinsic to human being. It illuminates what is at stake in our understanding of the relationship between the virtual and the real, showing how our present technologies both enhance and diminish our psychological lives. The authors claim that technology is a pharmakon - at the same time both a remedy and a poison - and in their writing exemplify a method that overcomes the polarization that compels us to regard it either as a liberating force or a dangerous threat in human life. The digital revolution challenges us to reckon with the implications of what is being called our posthuman condition, leaving behind our modern conception of the world as constituted by atemporal essences and reconceiving it instead as one of processes and change. The book’s postscript considers the sudden plunge into the virtual effected by the 2020 global pandemic. Accessible and wide-reaching, this book will appeal not only to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, but anyone interested in the ways virtuality and the digital are transforming our contemporary lives.

Ethical Considerations of Virtual Reality in the College Classroom collects case studies that address both pedagogical and ethical foundations of extended reality tools in postsecondary learning environments across disciplines. With today’s institutional programs and faculty leveraging cutting-edge virtual, augmented, and mixed reality opportunities to teach and promote achievement goals, it is imperative that new research into these technologies speaks directly to their challenges and affordances within broad academic settings. This book showcases real-world examples of faculty members who chronicle and develop their use of VR tools across learning contexts and student populations by creating their own digital experiences, adapting open-source tools, integrating commercial products, amplifying crucial course content, analyzing outcomes data, and more. Nontechnical readers will come away with a new understanding of key terms and concepts associated with virtual reality and essential heuristics for evaluating the ethical implications of immersive approaches.

This book requires an interdisciplinary understanding of creativity, ideal for the formation of a digital public culture. Educating students, young professionals and future engineers is to develop their capacity for creativity. Can creativity be learned? With this question, the relations of technology and art appear in a new light. Especially the notion of "progress" takes on a new meaning and must be distinguished from innovation. The discussion of particular educational approaches, the exploration of digital technologies and the presentation of best practice examples conclude the book. University teachers show how the teaching of creativity reinforces the teaching of other subjects, especially foreign languages.

The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology uniquely provides a comprehensive overview of human subjectivity in the technological age and how psychoanalysis can help us better understand human life. Presented in five parts, David M. Goodman and Matthew Clemente collaborate with an international community of scholars and practitioners to consider how psychoanalytic formulations can be brought to bear on the impact technology has had on the facets of human subjectivity. Chapters examine how technology is reshaping our understanding of what it means to be a human subject, through embodiment, intimacy, porn, political motivation, mortality, communication, interpersonal exchange, thought, attention, responsibility, vulnerability, and more. Filled with thought-provoking and nuanced chapters, the contributors approach technology from a diverse range of entry points but all engage through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and thought. This book is essential for academics and students of psychoanalysis, philosophy, ethics, media, liberal arts, social work, and bioethics. With the inclusion of timely chapters on the coronavirus pandemic and teletherapy, psychoanalysts in practice and training as well as other mental health practitioners will also find this book an invaluable resource.

In the classic edition of this outstanding book, originally published in 1998, Richard Frankel explores adolescence as a crucial, unique, and turbulent period of human development. He provides guidance for clinicians working with young people as they undergo significant transformations in the way they think, act, feel, and perceive the world. The book addresses how the disruptions manifest in adolescent behavior are upsetting and often incomprehensible to the adults surrounding them. It seeks to revision the traumas, extreme fantasies, testing of limits, etc., so endemic to this period of life through the lens of the urge toward self-realization. This allows for new and creative ways of working with the intensely confusing, and often extreme, countertransference feelings that arise in our encounter with adolescents. It offers ways of reflecting upon the vicissitudes of our own experience of being an adolescent that helps to unlock the typical impasses that occur in the stand-off between adult and adolescent ways of seeing the world. Through engagement with the work of Jung, Hillman, and Winnicott, Frankel offers a critique of the traditional psychoanalytic understanding of adolescence as a recapitulation of childhood, thus making a claim for adolescence as a discrete developmental period with its own originary dynamics. In this light, he explores such topics as individuation, persona, shadow, bodily, idealistic and ideational awakenings, as well as the effects of culture on development. Featuring numerous clinical case studies and clear theoretical formulations, this classic edition is important reading for psychotherapists, analysts, parents, educators, and anyone working with adolescents. This classic edition also includes also includes a new, extended introduction by the author that examines what effects the digital revolution is having on the contemporary experience of being an adolescent. Looking back on this work nearly 25 years since its publication, Frankel contends that the core themes of adolescence addressed in this book offer a compelling framework for comprehending both the positive and negative impacts of the digital on adolescent life.

This book addresses the growing use of computerized systems to influence people’s decisions without their awareness, a significant but underappreciated sea-change in the way the world works. To assess these systems, this volume’s contributors explore the philosophical and ethical dimensions of algorithms that guide people’s behavior by nudging them toward choices preferred by systems architects. Particularly in an era of heightened awareness of bias and discrimination, these systems raise profound concerns about the morality of such activities. This volume brings together a diverse array of thinkers to critically examine these nudging systems. Not only are high-level perspectives presented, but so too are of those who use them on a day-to-day basis. While algorithmic nudging can produce benefits for users there are also many less-obvious costs to using such systems, costs that require examination and deliberation. This book is a major step towards delineating these concerns and suggesting ways to provide a sounder basis for future policies for algorithms. It should be of interest to system designers, public policymakers, scholars, and those who wonder more deeply about the nudges they receive from various websites and on their phones.

This is a pioneering study of virtuality through human history: ancient-to-modern evolution and recent expansion; expression in many fields (chapters on Religion; Philosophy, Math, Physics; Literature and the Arts; Economics; Nationhood, Government and War; Communication); psychological and social reasons for its universality; inter-relationship with "reality." The book's thesis: virtuality was always an integral part of humanity in many areas of life, generally expanding over the ages. The reasons: 1- brain psychology; 2- virtuality's six functions — escape from boredom to relieving existential dread. Other questions addressed: How will future neuroscience, biotech and "compunications" affect virtuality? Can/should there be limits to human virtualizing?

The volume offers multiple perspectives on the way in which people encounter and think about the future. Drawing on the perspectives of history, literature, philosophy and communication studies, an international ensemble of experts offer a kaleidoscope of topics to provoke and enlighten the reader. The authors seek to understand the daily lived experience of ordinary people as they encounter new technology as well as the way people reflect on the significance and meaning of those technologies. The approach of the volume stresses the quotidian quality of reality and ordinary understandings of reality as understood by people from all walks of life. Providing expert analysis and sophisticated understanding, the focus of attention gravitates toward how people make meaning out of change, particularly when the change occurs at the level of social technologies- the devices that modify and amplify our modes of communication with others. The volume is organised into three main sections: The phenomena of new communication technology in people's lives from a contemporary viewpoint; the meaning of robots and AI as they play an increasing role in people's experience and; broader issues concerning the operational, sociological and philosophical implications of people as they address a technology driven future.