Psychoanalyst, ‘social media and smartphones impact children’s growth’

2023-10-05 12:39:01

Social networks and smartphone and tablet screens impact growth and behavior, especially in younger people. In this regard, psychoanalysts and psychologists have been raising the alarm for some years about the reduced attention and concentration capacity in young people, due to constant and excessive exposure to online information flows. Furthermore, electronic devices are particularly rewarding for adolescents, compared to children and adults, since the neural responses to environmental stimuli are more marked and prolonged in adolescence, among other things, due to the greater release of dopamine, especially when they mediate a social interaction. “The influence on psychic, rational and affective processes, individual and group, needs to be framed in a scientific and multidisciplinary perspective”, explains Adelia Lucattini, member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. “Immersive social media influence behaviors in a much more incisive way than other means of communication”.

“Numerous studies – explains the psychoanalyst in a note – have highlighted that online communication and entertainment activities are particularly relevant for the psychosocial autonomy of adolescents, since they are one of the factors that currently promote the development of personal identity and which activate the ability to start and maintain significant relationships with peers and family members. Social networks, if used well, have a revitalizing and stimulating effect from the point of view of knowledge and information. The web is a ‘great library’ ‘ within reach of a touch, from which children can draw information and study material, wherever they are. On the other hand, we cannot underestimate the negative effects. The phenomenon of ‘Second screen TV’ – continues Lucattini – risks on some occasions to exacerbate tones that go beyond the scope of healthy criticism and turn into personal attacks, with insults and marked verbal aggression”.

“The risk of our time is to build tribes instead of communities’

“Social media – he underlines – have transformed habits and customs, causing the society of communication to shift dangerously towards a society of conversation, of the pourparler understood as improvisation, superficiality and ‘made phrases’. The excessive simplification, the fragmentation of sentences and thoughts, the trivialization are a royal road to ideology and slogans that adapt to any context, without any critical thinking, capacity for reflection and possibility of making the necessary distinctions”.

“Social media are one of the transitional places where the identity of the youngest is formed. Online conversations – explains Lucattini – can weave true, solid and sincere relationships or, on the contrary, invade young people with persecutory anxieties, hatred and hatred, with Manichean friend-enemy dynamics. When this happens, there is no possibility of forming truly constructive relationships; the risk is of slipping backwards, convinced that we are proceeding forwards. The presence of positive figures on social media offers a alternative, a different point of view, gives back to the Internet its most beautiful meaning”.

“The risk of our time – he maintains – is that of erecting tribes rather than communities. Tribes with an archaic functioning, groups guided by a primitive unconscious that function ‘in basic assumption’, with defenses against the psychotic anxieties of its members, which are based on the exclusion of the other. We need to react to this narcissistic drift that focuses our gaze and love only on ourselves, dividing the world in two: us and the others. Offering training and information on social media can no longer be postponed. It is necessary to stimulate the school, so that it involves children, parents and families in digital education in a participatory way – concludes Lucattini – without mortifying the pleasure of gaming and playful, socially shared, online communication”.