Notes for paper given to 2012 New York regional meeting of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO)

1. I NO LONGER WANT TO BE ALONE: REPUBLISHING THE PRIVATE 1
David Patman
My talk begins with a question:
• In a society which appears to place such a high value on privacy and
the protection of personal information, why is that so many people
seem willing, if not eager, to publicly share intimate details of their
private lives via social media?
In addition to laws and statutes which seek to protect personal privacy, an increasing
number of organizations have implemented social media policies to prevent employees
from willingly or inadvertently exposing sensitive information online.Why would an
employee want to do this?
My working hypothesis is:
• Electronic media provides an environment that facilitates public
communication of material that cannot find expression in the
organizations and public institutions of post- industrial society .
By electronic communications technology, I mean smart-phones, PCs, tablets, large
capacity cloud and personal data storage, and the high-speed fixed and wireless networks
which connect them - the hardware, but not the software (although this distinction is not
clear cut).
Sherry Turkle and other psychoanalytically-informed commentators argue that social
media encourages users to behave in ways which are regressive. I argue that this is
actually a misunderstanding about the nature of media and their effects. In my view:
• Social media should be regarded as a symptom not a cause .
While behaviour associated with social media could be characterised as various forms of
psychopathology (and are in individual cases) such 'symptoms' are not caused by
electronic media, but by the alienating effects of industrial society. Electronic media make
these symptoms visible.
Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan believed that mental activity arises from the
interplay of the physical senses (beta elements in Bion's terms) - for him the psychic is
inherently 'tactile'. Media technologies extend one or more of the senses, containers which
externalise parts of the self (in a way not dissimilar to projection).
• The dominant medium - and therefore the dominant sense - in any
society shapes how both self and society are experienced .
McLuhan saw a qualitative difference in culture between societies dominated by speech,
print technologies and literacy, and electronic media (I'll give some brief illustrations of
these differences).
One of McLuhan's key ideas was that the 'medium is the message', implying that media
content is much less significant for a society than the medium itself. Also, he thought that
the content of any new medium is the old medium which it supersedes: new media
contains old media, in an almost Bionic way. For example, the content of the book is
speech, the content of film is the book, etc. In McLuhan’s terms:
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(notes for paper given to New York regional meeting of ISPSO 2012)
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2. • Social media as we know them - Facebook, Twitter, etc - are not media
at all, but media content . They are to the internet what programs are
to television.
Following McLuhan, social media - or more accurately the social content of the internet -
can be thought of as an expression of the older, print media, such as the book and the
pamphlet. Thus, early human interactions with computers have been algorithmic and text-
based, with emails are structured like letters, and even today blogs tend to be structured in
a linear, narrative way (eg. as a timeline) and joining tends to be organised in terms of
individual accounts and unique identities - just as in print culture.
Actually, adoption of a new medium tends to occur when an older one as failed in its
containing role, thus the content of new media is actually a failed older medium.
• In the case of the internet, social media represents the failures, not of
electronic culture, but of industrial society .
Our fascination with social media (content) applications is a kind of schadenfreude
because they reflect the failed project of literacy and modernity.
This is true of other electronic media: they contain and express the old media. For
example, the plot of most compelling TV shows - police, legal, family and hospital dramas -
are usually about institutional failure and the efforts of heroic individuals to beat the
'system'.
• Electronic media are, as it were, the harbingers rather than the
perpetrators of the death of the modern world . Is this death also the
death of privacy?
The main effect of print technology, according to McLuhan, is the creation of the 'public
individual' as a distinct, and self-aware entity. Such individuals relate to each other through
logic and rationality and, together, constitute a kind of social machine. However, for the
components of the machine to work in harmony, the messy parts of experience
(associated with sound, touch, taste and smell) must be split off into an area which can't
be seen - the realm of the 'private'.
• Modern civil society is characterised by a dialectic of privacy versus
'public- ity'
McLuhan suggests that the social splitting public from private facilitated by print media is
mirrored by a division of the psyche into conscious and unconscious. In non-literate
cultures, the unconscious as we know it in industrial society does not exist.
Electronic communications technology provides a medium for the return of the repressed,
as it were, through its blending of public and private space.
• The speed and immediacy of electronic communication publicly involve
people in each others private lives, a prospect which is both
enthralling and terrifying .
Traditional hierarchical institutions, which owe their existence to print, are profoundly
scandalised threatened by electronic media because they break down the public facade,
releasing 'inappropriate' (even 'indecent') material.
For people, electronic communication offers an opportunity to rediscover and de-privatise
an emotional experience which has been lost for several hundred years. Social media is
the manifest content, or symptom, of this repressed reality. It is the media of industrial,
literate, visually-oriented society that separates us from ourselves - not electronic media.
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3. • We are alone together, as Sherry Turkle observes; but we have been
so since Gutenberg: electronic media makes us more aware of our
isolation - and offers the hope of reconnection.
This perspective brings up the possibility of interpreting the content of electronic media as
if it were a symptom, or a dream - as symbolic of, or an enactment of, something normally
repressed that cannot find expression through another means. This also points to the
creative and reparative possibilities of electronic media.
It is possible to detect patterns and rhythms in the blogosphere which express and amplify
shared feelings and preoccupations: things which ‘go viral’, or become ‘memes’. Such
phenomena have meaning and can provide insight into the social dynamics of our era, just
as Charlotte Beradt’s collection of dreams provides an insight into the mind of Nazi
Germany. Closer to home: the popularity of certain topics or questions on the ISPSO
listserv may be able to tell us something about the ISPSO.
• The internet equivalent of the dream is the 'meme '
An opportunity for organizations is that social media can be used as a medium for self-
diagnosis, for identification of organizational (not personal) breakdown. Employee use of
social media at work, particularly in ways which appear to be damaging rather than
productive, indicates a point at which the organization has been unable to provide requisite
containment.
• Social media compensates for, in the Jungian sense, what is not
emotionally available at work.
What I think is needed, and what I think psychoanalysis can offer, is a way to notice and
reflect on these effects. Psychoanalysis emerged at around the same time as electric
technologies such as the telephone, and I think its adoption as a technology may have
been for similar reasons. Psychoanalysis remains the most effective 'medium' for getting in
touch with the parts of our private selves that have been repressed by our industrial culture
because:
• The consulting room restores the auditory (speech) and tactile (couch)
qualities of experience, which have been discarded by industrial
society in favour of the purely visual .
Perhaps, then, we can discover a form of electronic media which offers a similar
opportunity for collective reflection on what has been repressed. It is no accident that
social media has been associated with revolution and the overthrow of repressive state
institutions.
Such a medium would be synthetic, rather than analytic, bringing together and making
sense of the disparate experiences, images, likes, friends, followers, posts, tweets and
tags that currently populate the internet. It would allow us to wonder about the creative
possibilities that are emerging, as well as the painful feelings seeking to be heard.
• The technology for the ‘interpretation of memes’ is being imagined and
invented right now.
My hope is that technologists and psychoanalysts can find a way to share insights which
allows our disconnected post-industrial age to recognise and reconcile the private lives of
our industrial past which will confront us with ever greater insistency as the electronic age
continues to evolve.
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