An exploration of the opening of the field of psychological possibilities afforded by the internet

The title of this post gives away the subject matter that I intend to write about, hopefully not entirely. My goal here is to explore a growing body of ideas that I've been entertaining that concern, broadly, the effects of technology on human psychological functioning.

A common theme, at least for those in the non-biological areas of psychology, is the idea that the psychological processes of human beings are shaped by social activity, or other basic forms of activity. Lev Vygotsky and George Herbert Meade are associated with the first idea while Jean Piaget is associated with the second. Both share the core idea that our psychological structure is derived from our activity.

My own thinking has been deeply influenced by these ideas, but I want to suggest a third possible origin of our psychological processes that can account for some of the most basic organizational features that have traditionally emerged in humans and may continue to emerge: The basic features of the world as the setting of human life. This includes both the basic physical properties of the world (space and time), as well as the basic layout of the human body. Alongside the factors of social and basic physical activity, this factor will be referred to as physicality.

Physicality is distinct from the effects of social interaction and other activity in that it affects the overall organization of psychological processes, rather than the specific forms that they take. For example, social influences in our development determine which types of things we are willing to discuss in public and which we keep private, but physicality is the reason for the very possibility of privacy.

Privacy is typical of the kinds of psychological concepts that result from physicality. They are negotiated in certain ways according to certain cultural practices, but they emerge out of the structure of our interaction with the world. Privacy emerges first and foremost out of the fact that only some of the processes that correspond to our subjective mental life are visible to others (without the use of highly invasive technology). While we can choose to communicate our thoughts and feelings with others, we don't necessarily have to do this. As a result, our mental activity is able to go in directions that we don't have to fully disclose, and this is a consequence of the organization of our bodies.

Similarly, throughout our lives, our bodies exist in a specific series of locations in 4D spacetime. At any given point, we may be near or far from other people. This has profound implications for human beings because, as cultural animals, we have meaningful relationships with other people in our environment. Maintaining specific relationships-whether they're with other people or with social institutions-requires specific kinds of self regulation on our part. As anyone knows, this is not necessarily as constraining as it sounds because we're not always around the significant others in our lives. The fact that we have to act a certain way in the office doesn't require us to maintain the same code of conduct while at home, though there are still obvious limits to our freedom.

As I've gone on, some of what I've said has been untrue, or is no longer true. Technological and cognitive advances have steadily altered the effects of physicality by removing some of the constraints of the past, thereby allowing us to transcend the traditional boundaries of the physical world. Many cognitive and later technological developments can be seen in this light, such as the emergence, first of primitive semiotic systems seen in many animals, and later in more advanced form, human language. The development of literacy, and electronic communication have been a recent and profound example of this. Each of these is not an independent effort to transcend the constraints of physicality, but a cumulative process that builds on the achievements of previous efforts. The shining example of this in the present day are social networking sites such as Facebook. Facebook is a continuation of a stream of development that incorporates language, written language, networked computers, and finally the development of a domain of computer mediated activity that incorporates features of the offline social world (person-centered interaction), thereby going beyond the format of the non-agentive Web 1.0.

Each of these developments occurred to extend human perception and action beyond the traditional limits of the physical world. In doing this, what they have also done is freed us from some of the effects of physicality. Of course, the legacy of physicality in terms of its effects on culture are still with us. Concepts like privacy, personality, and so forth continue to exist even as the conditions that gave rise to their emergence are changing. What we're able to do now is to creatively develop these concepts in new ways and with the enhanced freedom provided by technological and cognitive advances. Games allow us to try out and develop different types of personalities, and social networking sites allow us to explicitly develop and control multiple presentations of ourselves--or decide to unify our personality into one single work/personal/family entity.

I would characterize our activity at this point as the beginnings of the realization of creative control over these concepts--though I don't want to speak for everyone, and exciting things may very well be going on that I'm completely unaware of. From what I've seen, we're just beginning to realize the potential for creative development of new forms of being--new ways to live as human beings, and new directions for development that have just opened.

Two points are important in this regard: First to realize that by allowing for profoundly creative redevelopment of how we can be as people, we have also allowed for the possibility of controlling who we are as people. Secondly, and on a lighter note, the importance of opening our minds to the fact that the new possibilities that we have made possible may not at all be obvious. The psychological concepts that emerged from physicality (i.e. by our living in a physical world whose constraints led to certain psychological features) are deeply ingrained in our thinking and the fact that we can create alternative concepts may not be readily obvious.