Digital Lives

This chapter maps the field of psychosocial / psychoanalytic digital media studies. It begins with a discussion and review of early, critical scholarship on the internet and online culture that has foregrounded potentially detrimental aspects of technology. I then discuss work that has highlighted the beneficial and nurturing aspects of online culture. I subsequently outline different, intertwined dimensions of digital lives today and how they have been reflected on in scholarship. They concern sexualities, and videogames. At the core of digital lives today and how they play out on social media, dating apps, games and other digital devices and platforms are psycho-social relations through which questions of self-reflexivity, confidence and value have become paramount. Platforms satisfy a desire for affective validation and containment. However, such potentials are also situated in a radically fantasmatic sphere and are always unstable. This chapter also outlines some of the differences between a psychosocial and a psychoanalytic approach to the digital.