Psychology of Cyberspace >> | Home Page | Article Index | Subject index | Search Engine | This article dated Oct 99 (v1.2) |
John Suler, Ph.D. | Rider University | Copyright Notice |
Wanting to control women like they control their cars and computers. Wanting to understand women like they understand their cars and computers. But failing on both scores. Not exactly an admirable portrayal of the male psyche! There is a strong tendency to perceive computers as if they are people, a phenomenon known as "transference." Norman Holland even suggested that we can regress to thinking that our computers are sexual beings, which seems to be the confusion that plagues the desperate GirlFriend user. However, whether the computer acts more like a man or a woman is an issue open to debate. In one joke about a "scientific poll" of attitudes concerning computers, the findings were divided:Cyberspace Humor
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Truth comes out in jest. In other words, jokes can be silly and funny at the same time as revealing some serious truths. This cartoon from the Atlanta Constitution is a good example (click on the picture for a full size view). It pokes fun at the issue of internet addiction - which looms large as one of the most pervasive concerns about the internet in this technology-driven culture of ours. The cartoon singles out a seriously addicted Phil while making us laugh about the situation. In reality, some people do become pathologically preoccupied with cyberspace, but also our culture - especially our media - is almost laughably addicted to scandals in general and to the topic of "addiction" in particular. Seeing the mouse up his nose, we're tempted to think that cyberspace is a mind-altering drug, a biochemical disorder, a transcendental entity to merge with, maybe even a phallic (and in Phil's case, homosexual) symbol. More icons of our contemporary cultural psyche! And is it a coincidence that it's a male who gets so narcissistically wrapped up in his machine while the women, bonding together, assess the situation?
While browsing the web, my daughter Asia found this little bit of auditory humor that amplifies this anxiety about internet addiction [.wav file 96k]. We get so hypnotized by cyberspace that we need a warning signal to help us snap out of it! Conveniently and ironically, perhaps we can program our computers to do it! There are many other jokes about internet addiction. Because we're a very medical oriented and symptom preoccupied culture, quite a few of them focus on the "signs" that one has gone overboard. For example:
The Top 10 Signs You're Addicted to the Net
10. You wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and stop and check your e-mail on the way back to bed.9. You get a tattoo that reads "This body best viewed with Netscape Navigator 1.1 or higher."
8. You name your children Eudora, Mozilla and Dotcom.
7. You turn off your modem and get this awful empty feeling, like you just pulled the plug on a loved one.
6. You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your lap...and your child in the overhead compartment.
5. You decide to stay in college for an additional year or two, just for the free Internet access.
4. You laugh at people with 2400-baud modems.
3. You start using smileys in your snail mail.
2. The last mate you picked up was a JPEG.
1. Your hard drive crashes. You haven't logged in for two hours. You start to twitch. You pick up the phone and manually dial your ISP's access number. You try to hum to communicate with the modem.
You succeed.
What's amusing about these internet jokes - especially to avid onliners - is how they mix reality and fantasy. Hardcore e-mail users do seize the first opportunity they can to check their in-box. And 2400 baud modems indeed seem like silly toys to the experienced user. The fantasy turns to the absurd when cyberspace begins to take over your in-person life. Like an invasion of the body snatchers, it becomes your children and your mate. It becomes the loved one, the source of oceanic oneness and bliss. This quest to psychically meld into union with one's computer fueled the April Fool's prank about the telepathically controlled e-mail headset called "Orrechio" (see my article about cyberspace as psychological space). The fantasy relationship with our computer may express our grandiose wish to control everything in our lives - a wish revealed in these file options on a weary office worker's monitor. The bottom line is that the fantasy rests on both a wish AND a fear. We want omnipotent control with the computer. We want omnipotent control over the computer. But what goes around comes around. It may take control over us.
Here's another sound clip that Asia found during her journeys. I had to laugh out loud when she played it for me. Entitled "Trapped on the Internet" (wav file 464k), it's sung to the tune of the "Gilligan's Island" theme song. For a change, internet addiction is not (at least overtly) the gist of these silly lyrics. Instead, it portrays another pervasive cultural anxiety regarding the internet - the paranoia about malicious people coming after you, in this case, the mysterious, all-knowing, almost demonic "cybergeeks" who reign over the internet. They are the incarnation of the Boogey Man who hide in the corners of cyberspace rather than under our beds. Unable to escape them, the protagonist in the song resorts to pulling the plug on his computer, but to no avail. Caught by some supernatural intervention, he's STILL trapped on the internet! It's not just the cybergeeks we fear, but also the unearthly, almost mystical powers of this inescapable thing called "cyberspace." It threatens to overcome reality and swallow us up! Perhaps not coincidentally, this was a theme I tinkered with in my novel Madman when the protagonist Thomas Holden - a weary and stressed psychology intern - seeks help from a computerized psychotherapist program called "Siggie" (here's the excerpt which appears in my article about computerized psychotherapy).
Computers that act like people, people that act like computers. As our machines become more and more sophisticated - almost as sophisticated as their creators - we start to wonder whether there's much of a difference between the two. Does the human mind work like a computer? Can computers become almost human? Interesting scientific and philosophical questions! These issues could lead to some rather maladaptive attitudes about human relationships that are parodied in jokes like this:
Seeking technical support for Girlfriend:
I'm currently running the latest version of Girlfriend 2.0 and am having some problems. I've been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 all along as my primary application, and all the Girlfriend releases have always conflicted with it. I hear DrinkingBuddies won't crash if you run Girlfriend in background mode with the sound switched off. But I'm embarrassed to say that I can't find the button to turn it off. I just run them separately, and it works OK. I probably should have stayed with Girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance with Girlfriend 2.0.
My friend also told me that Girlfriend 2.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiancee 1.0. And after that, you have to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he said is a huge resource hog. On top of that, Wife 1.0 comes bundled with MotherInLaw 1.0 which has an automatic pop-up feature that can't be turned off. I told him to install Mistress 1.0, but he said that if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife 1.0, that Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won't install anyway due to insufficient resources.
Anybody out there able to offer technical advice.......?
---------------------------- A file that big? It might be very useful. But now it is gone. ---------------------------- | |||
------------------------------------ The Web site you seek cannot be located but endless others exist ---------------------------- | |||
- - - - - --- --- -------------------------------------- Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return. -------------------------------- | |||
-------------------------------- - - ABORTED effort: Close all that you have. You ask way too much. ---------------------------- | |||
------------------------------------ First snow, then silence. This thousand dollar screen dies so beautifully. ----------------------------------------- | |||
-- ------------------------------ Stay the patient course Of little worth is your ire The network is down ----------------------------------- -- - | |||
--------------------------------- A crash reduces your expensive computer to a simple stone. ---------------------------- | |||
----- ------------------------------- You step in the stream, but the water has moved on. This page is not here. ------------------------------- | |||
-------------------------------------- Out of memory. We wish to hold the whole sky, But we never will. ------------------------------------------- - - |