The Digital Revolution’s Challenges to Our Humanity: Part 2--The Psychologic

2nd of 5-part series on the digital revolution. Today we look at the psychologic harms.

Expressive individualism sets the background that already drives us more into the psychologic.  This overemphasis on our thoughts, emotions, and desires leads to narcissism.  This preoccupation with self-referential thinking or thinking about “me” leads to unhappiness.

Silicon Valley exploits this turn to the psychologic by exploiting our mechanisms for producing positive emotions.  Their techniques take advantage of an unnatural environment overwhelming our neurobiology resulting in boredom and anxiety over “fear of missing out” on the next positive emotion served up by digital technology.  Although positive emotions are beneficial, we need all of PERMA (P: positive emotions, E: engagement, R: relationships, M: meaning, and A: accomplishment) to flourish. Digital technology increasingly provides positive emotions unhinged from these other essentials. 

The psychologic is now in overdrive. We are increasingly out of balance, not working in harmony, and neglecting/harming the basic goods.  This is a root cause of our mental health issues.

Social media, video games, and pornography are great threats.  Social media is harmful especially to children and adolescents.  Videogames drive us deeper into the psychologic isolating us from our other dimensions and can lead to addiction.  Finally, pornography panders to psychologic desires dissociated from social, biologic, or spiritual goods.  Internet pornography has led to alarming rates of sexual dysfunction through distorted expectations and addiction.  

 We must moderate our time and engagement with these technologies.  We must strive for balance and harmony and promote the basic goods.  Self-transcending our psychologic and fully engaging our other 3 dimensions is essential to restoring balance that the digital technology continually threatens.

 References
Expressive individualism references in episode 3

Gazzaley and Rosen’s The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World highlights our neurobiology and psychology

Clare Morell’s How Digital Media Helped Shape the “Modern Self” reviews expressive individualism and digital technology

Joshua Pauling’s Modern Man Is Psychologized, Sexualized, Politicized—and Digitized explains how the digitized man is not whole

Ronald Siegel’s The Science of Mindfulness: A Research-Based Path to Well-Being reviews data supporting mindfulness 

Marty Seligman’s Flourish explains PERMA

Trevor Haynes’ Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time shows how our brains are manipulated

Surgeon General’s Advisory Social Media and Youth Mental Health  is a wakeup call

Elayne Allen’s Let’s Stigmatize Smart Phones advocates for public change of our behavior

Internet pornography harms in Dr. Brian Park's Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports

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