A number of writers, including Young (1995, 1996), Holland (1995) and Civin (2000), have argued that something happens to social relationships in cyberspace that can be understood with reference to psychoanalytic ideas, theories and concepts.  For all these writers, there is something about cyberspace that facilitates some of the more primitive forms of relating that have, for example, been expounded by Melanie Klein.  So, Young argues that communications in cyberspace – through the web and e-mail – lead to forms of object relating characteristic of the paranoid schizoid position;  that is, relating governed by phantasy, splitting, paranoia, idealisation and what Bion (1961) has terms pathological projective identification.  Civin, enlarging on some of Bion’s idea, has described how e-mail communications can come to be experienced as forms of attack. As he puts it:
 

…the information system ceased to provide information.  Instead, the data that emanated from it [e-mail] were like Bion’s beta particles: things-in-themselves, inescapable shrapnel-like missile fragments of facts that covered the terrain and richocheted about so that it grew impossible to conclude if their source was internal or external (2000:179)

It is noticeable that these writers – and many others, including myself (Bird, forthcoming) – tend to see e-mail and other forms of computer-mediated communication as either negative or, at best, a provoking forms of profound ambivalence.  The computer industry may be manically optimistic about the latest in mobile phone technology, but many academic writers do not express such optimism.

Some current work in progress suggests that users of new technology – in particular, mobile phones – are, themselves ambivalent, but also suggest some rather interesting aspects of communication using the mobile phone and textmessaging. A pilot study of nearly 100 undergraduates at a British university – men and women of ages ranging from 19 to 45 on a range of university programmes – indicates the importance of the mobile phone in the structure of their social lives and suggests that, in the absence of the visual and bodily cues characteristic on ‘real’ social relating, ‘virtual’ social relating does, indeed, reveal some of the more primitive aspects of psychic life so well described, for example, by Klein and Bion.

The Mobile Phone and the Texture of Social Relations

Simmel (1903/1950), refers to the shallowness and transitoriness of social relationships in a complex, modern society and we can conclude from this that such social relationships will play themselves out in the realm of the psycho-social.  We can begin to see this in the results of a student questionnaire.

Typically, students acquire a mobile phone to deal with emergencies – for example, in the event of their car breaking down on the motorway.  Women students are more likely to see emergency use as the motivator for acquiring a mobile than are the men.  Rapidly, the mobile becomes a way to maintain social relationships.  It portability makes it a flexible and convenient way to keep in contact.  This much we might see as obvious.

However, there is something more to this than simply convenience in the organisation of social networks.  Many of the students make and receive a large number of phone calls and textmessages in a week: nearly 40% receive between 20 and 50 phone calls;  for textmessages the percentage is closer to 55%.  This is more than they had previously received using landlines,  This may account for the frequent incursion of mobile ring-tones in otherwise inappropriate situations – the lecture theatre, for example!  There seems to be what we could call a need for connectedness together with a shallowness of content in that connectedness;  the content of calls and textmessages seems to be trivial – “I am here, where are you”.  The attachment to the mobile – revealed, for example, in student reactions to the idea that the frequency of calls and messages might decline – has the flavour of the infantile and the manic.  75% of the respondents were negative about any decline in connectedness through mobile and text.  Typical phrases included: “lost, deserted, abandoned”;  “devastated’;  “lonely”; “a bit sad at not being thought about”; “cut off from people”; “like something is missing”.  “like I had no friends”.

There is, in many of their comments, a reaction which is as much affective as it is rational.  Devastation, abandonment and loss are features that are often characteristic of peoples' experience of early parental attachment and these seem to have been transferred to feelings about mobile phones and textmessages.  Although the students are not really disconnected from friends and family there seems to be, in their use of the mobile phone, a phantasy of being disconnected.

Becoming Paranoid About Text Messaging

Civin's work  suggests that, in the case of e-mails, their proliferation induces paranoia;  phantasies of being attacked by the technology/the people are common amongst those people he studied.  For him, the proliferation of e-mails has consequences for both the organisations in which people work and for the individuals' psyche.  People become withdrawn, increasingly relate only through the technology, and experience this relating through technology as inevitably involving an attack which induces anxiety.

There is little of this in the student responses to the pilot questionnaire.  E-mails and textmessages have things in common - they are electronic, they involve conventions not associated with other forms of social relationships, they lack the physical cues of much of our social lives.  Civin's subjects become paranoid whereas my students seem, on the contrary, to revel in textmessages;  it is only when they cannot get enough of them that paranoia seems to develop.  Further research will be needed to explain this.  The difference may be to do with age, with the fact that in Civin's study the respondents were employed, with possible differences between the media of e-mail and text.

The Physical in the Texture of Social Relations

I would like to point to a further issues raised by Young, Holland and others, and that is the issue of the effects of not having physical - visual, auditory, gestural and other - signals when using e-mail and text.  Generally, the implications of this have been interpreted as negative.  For example, Holland suggests it is partly as a result of this lack of cues that e-mailing can involve flaming;  Young sees the lack of physicality when 'in' cyberspace as favouring  primitive and destructive feelings.

As yet, the student responses do not permit any empirical conclusions on this, but the issue of the lack of physical cues will form part of the next stage of the research.  Although the respondents, for example, do not seem to be interpreting text messages as threatening, it will require more interview-based, qualitative research to tease out some of the more psycho-social issues in mobile phone usage.

From Communication to Information

Finally, some attention will need to be given to the content of mobile phone and text messages.  Is there something new about such messages compared with what happens  when people are in physical contact?  The newness of mobile phone and textmessage communication has already been discussed, for example, by Myerson (2001).  In developing an analysis of the mobile phone through the works of Heidegger and Habermas, he characterises what happens through the mobile as simply the provision of information.  Whereas most communication involves a recognition and possible understanding of the other person, mobile phone communication is, essentially, the provision of information through a technology which does not really require a person on the other end of the handset!  We will need to see if this primary role for the technology is one of the things that leads to the primitive processes characteristic of forms of computer-mediated communication.

References

BION W R  (1961)  Experiences in Groups.  London, Tavistock

BIRD J F (2003)  "I wish to speak to the despisers of the body": the internet, physicality and
                psychoanalysis.  Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Forthcoming

CIVIN M (2000)  Male, Female, E-mail: the struggle for relatedness in a paranoid society.
                New York, The Other Press

HOLLAND N (1995)  The internet regression. www.human-nature.com/free associations

MYERSON G (2001)  Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone.  London, Icon Books

SIMMEL G (1903/50) The metropolis and mental life.  In Wolff K (ed)
                The Sociology of George Simmel.  Glencoe, Free Press

YOUNG R M (1995)  Psychoanalysis and/of the internet.
               www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers

YOUNG R M (1996)  Primitive processes on the internet.
               www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers