Concerned Netizen Clinton Ignatov of the LessMad Substack and I sat down for a conversation on September 5th, 2024. Our broad topic: the influence of online life and internet culture for personality identity formation. Clinton, a life-long digital native, has been writing a lot about growing up online and the effects of media upon his personal development, most recently through the lens of my specialism, developmental psychology.
Furthermore, Clinton and I have a mutual friend in internet historian
of Default Wisdom, sharing her interest in the work of social psychologist Sherry Turkle of MIT. Clinton also writes for Katherine on the subject of Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan. Meanwhile, Katherine and I have previously discussed the role of internet culture on personality development in a legacy Callin episode, also posted as a short-form podcast here on the . I have also discussed how the ascendance of virtual life challenges classical understanding of the role of play in the development of self and cultural identity, in part II of my Politics of the Psyche series which also goes into depth about the political chaos and social fragmentation that now characterizes our cultural milieu.
Either we retain notions of abnormal identity as they are, or we try to evolve them with a new way of growing up; a new way of manufacturing identities. —J.D.
The contrasts and complementarities between myself and Clinton are emphasized by the differing terms and conceptual frameworks we use to approach the common subject of personality formation in a world in which social interaction online is increasingly the (default) manner in which individuals develop their sense of self and psychological identity.
As you will hear, our initial conversation raises many questions about how society may or may not integrate and support personalities which are developed outside the world of embodied living. Specifically, the overwhelming role which our new technological environment plays in the development of personality identity formation, and whether the field of psychology needs to abandon classical psychodynamic conceptualizations of impaired personalty functioning.
Our conversation is the first of what we aim to be a series of conversations about our evolving understanding of personality identity formation in the digital age. We look forward to listener feedback on this first installment of our dialogue which is being released as the first long-form podcast conversation on the
.
Share this post