The Paradox of Internet Groups

Alone in the Presence of Virtual Others

Haim Weinberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429921650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The New International Library of Group Analysis Drawing on the seminal ideas of British, European, and American group analysts, psychoanalysts, social psychologists, and social scientists, the books in this series focus on the study of small and large groups, organisations, and other social systems, and on the study of the transpersonal and transgenerational sociality of human nature. NILGA books will be required reading for the members of professional organisations in the fields of group analysis, psychoanalysis, and related social sciences. They will be indispensable for the "formation" of students of psychotherapy, whether they are mainly interested in clinical work with patients or in consultancy to teams and organisational clients within the private and public sectors.

CHAPTER ONE
It is all about relationships

Internet popularity and its spread

In December 1995, sixteen million people around the world were using the Internet, accounting for 0.4% of the population in the world at that time. In June 2010, it was estimated that 1,966 millions of people were using the Internet, which equals 26.7% of the world’s population (www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). This means that the use of the Internet multiplied itself by more than 123 times within fifteen years. It seems that the use of the Internet is accelerating and its impact on everyday life is enormous. In some continents, such as North America, the growth between 2000 and 2010 was 146%. In Africa this growth is estimated as 2,350%. Some of this impact is direct and clear, and some is subtle and covert.

A 2010 poll for the BBC World Service (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8548190.stm) discovered that almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right. The survey was conducted among more than 27,000 adults across twenty-six countries. Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens. In 2011 the United Nations also ruled that internet access is a human right (www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/08/internet-access-human-right-united-nations-report_n_872836.html).

Actually, we do not need this statistical evidence to become aware of how much the Internet has spread around the world and to be convinced of its importance in the life of people everywhere. We intuitively sense the impact of being connected online on our daily behaviour. What is more difficult to perceive and understand is the deeper, subtle and sometimes unconscious ways in which Cyberspace crawls into our minds.

The three areas of Internet use

Internet activity and use can be divided into three big arenas: information, transactions, and interactions.

Information is about data. When we use the Internet as a source of information, it actually serves as a huge database, from which we can retrieve the relevant information for our purposes. Whether we look at Google maps for directions, check the weather, read the news online, search Wikipedia to learn about Socrates, or even search for a scientific article on group therapy, we relate to the Internet as a hard drive which stores gigabytes of information. In this way, the Internet fulfils Asimov’s vision of Multivac, the universal computer that accumulated every bit of information across generations (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivac).

The main difficulties with this use of the Internet are finding the relevant information, distinguishing between important data and inaccurate or insignificant ones, and not getting lost in the flood of information. The advantage of the Internet in this area is obvious: it saves us a lot of time and energy. Instead of going to the library and spending hours looking for an article, waiting for the newspaper to reach our door in order to read the news, or keeping maps of all the cities in the area, we can retrieve the data with a click of a mouse.

Transactions include commercial and business activity, also known as E-commerce. Many times this activity is formal and involves connecting with machines. Here are some examples: checking bank statements, paying a bill through PayPal, purchasing a flight ticket, or registering for a conference. This use of the Internet saves us time and energy as well. From the vendor’s point of view the Internet poses a huge advantage. A small business in a forgotten town can reach hundreds of thousands of clients, something which they could have never dreamt of before the Internet. Big companies can save a lot of money by replacing human salespersons with automatic transactions, and bank personnel can be reduced because many services can be done online. However, as traditional business strategies are losing out to new, unconventional tactics, businesses must be flexible enough to survive in Cyberspace. In fact, more and more commercial transactions are executed this way, and it is estimated that in 2011 US E-commerce and online retail sales are projected to reach $197 billion, an increase of 12% over 2010 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_commerce).

The main problem in this kind of activity is confidentiality. Because our private financial information might be violated, we need to use passwords, protected websites, and other techniques to keep our privacy and prevent identity theft.

Interactions make up the field that interests us in this book. Writing e-mails to friends, communicating in Internet forums and listserves, posting on a website that is aimed at dating, using social networks such as Facebook, or even writing a blog or commenting to someone’s blog, or to a posted video on YouTube: all these activities involve exchange of ideas, connecting with people, and focusing on relationship. Where other areas of using the Internet receive a balanced criticism of their pros and cons (most of the time looking at the benefits more than at the disadvantages), the various ways of connecting through the Internet have mostly encountered a negative attitude, not by avid users, whose numbers increase exponentially, but by scholars, writers, researchers, and journalists.

Criticism and concerns about using the Internet

We can find numerous articles criticising the Internet and the relationships that typify it. “Virtual relationship” they are titled, “shallow and unreal” people say, “nothing compared to face-to-face interaction”. Authors wonder how we deteriorated from the art of writing letters that was so highly esteemed in the eighteenth century, to this quick-impulsive-one-sentence response of emails, or even worse, in text messages, where even the original words are abbreviated (u instead of you) to be more efficient. The criticism, as in the example above, is not limited only to Internet communication, but to all forms of electronic communication that became so popular in the twenty-first century. It usually comes from people who grew up in days where the world-wide-web (www) was only a fantasy in Asimov’s science fiction stories (e.g., Multivac, the universe computer, as mentioned above). This critique is aimed toward young people who were born into a world where cell phones are taken for granted.

Here is an example from an article in the Washington Post published on 8 August 2010 (Shapira, 2010): “A generation of e-mailing, followed by an explosion in texting, has pushed the telephone conversation into serious decline, creating new tensions between baby boomers and millennials—those in their teens, 20s and early 30s”. The writer even suggests a psychological explanation for the overuse of text messages by youngsters at the expense of phone calls: “. . .the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, Facebooking or tweeting.”

Clearly, the difference in communications preferences has created a palpable perception gap between young adults and their parents. “What do you mean, you have 300 friends on Facebook?” I heard a father asking his son. “What is the meaning of friendship if you do not really know most of them? Will any of these “friends” come for your help when you need them, as true friendship should be?” Parents and people above their forties seem to forget that they had the same kind of misunderstandings with their parents while they were adolescents, although around other issues: “You are going steady,” my father used to ask me, “and without knowing her parents or family? How is that possible?”

Some writers go as far as to say that Facebook has revolutionised the way we relate to one another more than anything since the invention of postal service. The question is whether this revolution positively changes relationships or has a deteriorating impact on the quality of relations. On the one hand we can point out that this way of connection through e-mails, Internet forums or online social networks such as Facebook, is the best adaptation to a fractured, dynamic world. It expanded the number of people we could meet every day from a handful to hundreds. It removed the time constraint from our social networking. Usually, in the face-to-face world, we invest a large amount of time to a limited number of friends (some estimate it as 40% of our limited social time devoted to five friends). On Cyberspace we can “talk” to as many people as we like. It is true that the amount of time invested in relationship determines the depth and quality, so probably many of these texted relations are not very deep.

In reality, research is not so consistent about the impact of Internet relationship on its users. Take, for example, a study by Kraut et al. (1998) that showed a correlation between Internet use and declines in social relationships and isolation. As you might expect, they found that greater use of the Internet was associated with small, but statistically significant declines in social involvement and with increases in loneliness as measured by communication with the family and the size of people’s local social networks.

That paper was titled the “Internet paradox” because although the Internet is heavily used for communication, it makes people lonelier. Strong relationships developed online are rare, according to this study, and most people use the internet to keep up with offline relationships. So far it seems that this study suits the criticism and the expectations of many scholars who claim that more Internet use results in less human connectedness. But when Kraut et al. (2002) repeated their research four years later, they showed that the internet had a positive effect on social and psychological well-being. Unsurprisingly, this was more pronounced for extroverts and more socially connected people.

In fact, the latest conclusion about the impact of the Internet on relations (see October, 2013, http://suite101.com/a/internet-anti-social-behavior-theory-unfounded-a111897 and September, 2011, www.calsouthern.edu/content/srticles/technology-impact-onsocial-relationships-surprising-data) is that, despite early studies suggesting that Internet use leads to anti-social behaviour, later findings indicate positive aspects of engaging in online socialising. Apparently, cyber or online social networking may increase a person’s social ease, the breadth and depth of off-line relationships, and their overall “social capital”—the resources accumulated through the relationships with people.

Change of focus in public concerns about Internet risks

At the beginning of Internet era use and e-mail communication, psychologists believed that it would prove positive for socially phobic or shy people. They assumed that the anonymity typifying this kind of communication will help people with low self-esteem overcome their difficulties with connection. So when speculating about positive results, they usually restricted them to this problematic population. This point of view was clearly short-sighted and totally wrong. It is not the first time that psychologists have not been so good in predicting the outcome of a technological/social revolution.

Being a group psychotherapist, this false assumption—misunderstanding the nature of the beast and the potentially deep meaning of Internet communication—reminds me of the misconceptions about who is suitable for group therapy: that is, assuming that it is beneficial only for people with social phobia or lacking social skills, a premise still common among therapists who work only individually. This premise has nothing to do with the diversity of human problems that can be helped by the group.

On the other hand, when assessing the dangers of the net from the psychological point of view, there was and continues to be a lot of concern around creating false identities, becoming Internet addicted, and giving up social interaction in the real world. Notice how many negative implications these authors related to connecting over Cyberspace, concluding that pathologies developed will outgrow pathologies “cured”. As an example, one of the work groups established for creating the new DSM 5 explored substance related disorders and recommended that the diagnostic category include both substance use disorders and non-substance addictions and other addiction-like behavioural disorders such as “Internet addiction”. They finally decided that such categories will be considered as potential additions to this diagnosis as and if data accumulates.

We can track the development and changes of fears around Internet use by observing and following the concerns of parents about their children’s use of this “monster”. In the historical development of the social concerns about the use of the Internet, we can identify two eras. In the first period, which lasted until around 2005, writers were worried more about Internet abuse (overuse of the Internet at the expense of other social activities). This period followed the excessive use of video games (see the popular science fiction movie “Tron”, from 1982), and the danger seemed to be that children could drift into a dream world, play “Dungeons and Dragons” all day long, use the Internet to hide their real identity, thus learning to cheat and lie about their true self, or become confused about who they are.

In one of the important books about the psychology of the Internet written at that time, Life On the Screen (1995), Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and psychologist usually researching psychoanalysis and culture, did her best to convince the readers that there is no danger, and that the opposite is true. She claimed that assuming different personal identities in computer fantasy games may be therapeutic, because it is an opportunity to experience the multiple facets of the self (this idea about the multiple self was elaborated by relational psychoanalysts, such as Steven Mitchell and others). No other environment, she claimed, can provide such experimentation. What would be considered pathological in the “real” world (e.g., diffused identity disorder (DID) or psychopath) is perfectly normal in Cyberspace.

It is interesting to notice how the concerns about the Internet shifted around the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, perhaps along the massive use of Facebook (launched in 2004 and acquiring 800 million users in 2011). More and more fears were expressed about the “dark side” of Cyberspace, such as an easy access to pornography, being exploited by child perpetrators, and other safety concerns. If in the first half of the decade concerns were expressed more about hiding the true identity of the writers, and keeping personal information too private, thus creating an “illusion of truth” or a dream world in Cyberspace, in the second half, the opposite worry emerged: lack of privacy and being too exposed to others. Parents became worried that their children might meet someone dangerous through the Internet, give away personal information, and lose their privacy. As an example for the public concerns, on 9 November 2010 the New York Times published an article about an attempt to pass a law for a “do not track” feature that would let Internet users tell Websites to stop surreptitiously tracking their online habits and collecting clues about age, salary, health, location, and leisure activities (www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/business/media/10privacy.html). In a CyberEthics website under the title “The invisible enemy” we can find the following sentence: “Social networking sites and the mIRC are the number one cause of losing anonymity and human deception.” (mIRC stands for Internet Relay Chat) (www.cyberethics.info/cyethics1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=160&ltemid=30&lang=en).

The truth is that the risks encountered by young people on the Internet are less significant than is often believed. This has been demonstrated by a project co-funded by the European Union and the London School of Economics and Political Science that surveyed more than 25,000 EU Kids of nine to sixteen year olds and their parents in twenty-five countries. The researchers (Livingstone, Haddon, Görzig, & Ólafsson, 2011) found that 93% of nine to sixteen year old users go online at least weekly. Fifty-nine per cent of them have a social networking profile and 26% report that their profile is public so that anyone can see it. However, being bullied online by receiving nasty or hurtful messages was found as relatively uncommon (6%), and it is quite rare for children to meet a new online contact offline (one in twelve children. Although for some parents 8% might still sound scary). Exposure to pornography is more common (although still only 14% report having seen images online that are obviously sexual). Interestingly enough, parents seem to be either unaware or deny that their children encounter these risks and around half of the parents whose children reported experiencing these risks did not realise it.

Most of the current criticism of the Internet relates to questions of privacy and warns us about possible violations of our privacy online. In fact, the global use of online communication, social networking and other Internet tools, challenges our commonly held assumptions about which information should be regarded as public and which should be viewed as private. Some experts within the field of Internet security and privacy express an extreme opinion that privacy does not exist; “Privacy is dead—get over it.”

The question of privacy and keeping information confidential is very relevant to psychotherapists who see it as a fundamental rule in therapy, creating safety in the therapeutic relationship. Group therapists have a special interest in this question because in a group, it is not only the therapist who is bound to confidentiality, but every member of the group as well. In a way, trusting other members of the group to not make use of the information one reveals during the sessions and to keep it strictly confidential is based on quite a naïve mutual trust and more on an agreement to believe without testing whether participants’ privacy is kept. Does this belief remind the reader of the way some people naively believe their privacy is kept on the Internet? In a later chapter (Chapter Five), we will more deeply explore these issues of boundaries, the public and private spheres, and how they are influenced by the Internet through the lens of group analysis.

The need to connect

In my opinion, many scholars and critics of the Internet miss an important question to be asked: if the Internet is perceived as so dangerous, what makes people use it so excessively? Assuming that people are aware of its risks—and it is difficult not to be aware when the dangers are stated in the media everyday (the number of websites warning about online risks and providing tips for safe use is enormous)—why do they still expose themselves to these dangers? We might assume that they are aware and taking the right measures to reduce the danger. Even if that is true, at least one possible meaning is that there must be something in Internet communication that answers the deep needs of many people.

Those who claim that Internet connections are shallow and virtual miss the important point: it is all about relationships. It does not matter whether we create deep relationships and how real they are. The crucial issue is that we desperately need to feel connected, to be in a relationship, to feel that we belong, and that we are part of a community, or perhaps even part of something bigger than ourselves, and the Internet provides an illusion of being connected to the world with the tip of your finger. When it comes to connectivity, support systems, and a sense of belonging, no other tool can provide these needs so quickly and easily.

The need to connect is very human, starting from infancy and never ending. Attachment theory claims that from birth we are attached to our care-givers and need this emotional bond...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Dedication
• NEW INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF GROUP ANALYSIS FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE It is all about relationships
• CHAPTER TWO The frame of reference of group analysis
• CHAPTER THREE Cultures and (virtual) groups: the Internet culture
• CHAPTER FOUR The non-body on the Internet: presence, immediacy, subjects, and (group) therapy
• CHAPTER FIVE Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries (and the forum manager/ group leader's role)
• CHAPTER SIX A large group with the illusion of a small group: listserve and forum dynamics
• CHAPTER SEVEN The Internet and the social unconscious: from intimacy to E-ntimacy©
• CHAPTER EIGHT Yalom's therapeutic factors virtually examined
• CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES
• INDEX