"Knowledge, as well as the authority that derives from it, is always available and without discontinuity".

Any reformulation of technologies invites the reconstruction of our ways of caring for and educating children. We fear for its deleterious effects and dream of its benefits. Freud said that the same progress that brought the railway lines taking away our loved ones, invented the telephone that overcomes that distance. Lacan formalized the problem in a more tragic way: there is no progress, as we do not know what we have lost, we cannot assess what we are gaining.

Yet the transformation of a way of life leaves relics that we cultivate as culture and living ruins that are like sequels to a future that cannot be anticipated. Now, when we have a first generation born and raised with abundant and unrestricted access to digital life, we can start to separate a lifestyle, like the Nerd or Geek, from new ways of suffering, grouped here around the child digital intoxication.

Like any technology, it only favors or intensifies already existing dispositions, so the traits described below should be understood as examples of uses that a child can make of digital life, usually in association with certain conditions of family relationship and education that are related to it. and complementary:

(1) Presence super offer. Children between zero and two years old, exposed to tablets develop an extreme connection with the presence of the other, represented by the offer of attractive images and auditory or sensorial stimulation adapted to the child's demands. This kind of electronic pacifier not only harms the formation of the visual-motor system or attention, it introduces an intersubjective novelty, the belief that the other is always available.

Freud watched his grandson throw a spool attached to a line out of the crib and pull it back, saying pleasantly, "here" and "there." From this he intuited a model of symbolization based on playing. In doing so, the child replaces the absent mother with the present spool. She inverts the passively lived experience, with the mother's absence, into an active act of playing and pulling the spool.

The third symbolizing fact is in the introduction of a significant word: here there. It replaces the anguish of the absence and excessive presence of the maternal Thing. Tablets react to gestures not words. They pacify not only because they perform the function of the spool that replaces the adult caregiver, but because they propose new visual and acoustic stimuli. This eliminates the dead time, in which the absence of the other is the uncomfortable but creative time of invention of its ludic substitute. In this “lost” time, we learn to calm down, but also to be interested in each other.

The creation of a total occupancy device, always available, turned waiting situations into occupancy situations. A way of being permanently with the other in presence is established, which confirms the assumption that he is always interested in offering us attention, objects, images or words. It is a model of upbringing and children whose horizon is the formation of a demanding consumer, who knows he is always right and who thinks of the other as a market that has a duty to please him, being always at our disposal.

“The creation of a total occupancy device, always available, turned waiting situations into occupancy situations. A way of being permanently with the other in presence is established, which confirms the assumption that he is always interested in offering us attention, objects, images or words”.

(2) Isolation and reduction of social bond. The assumption that the Other always takes the initiative affects the structure of demand, interfering in the formation of attitudes such as giving, receiving, asking or sharing. When the Other does not offer me anything, this is read as a sign of lack of love and indifference, but without inciting work to interest the other. Two elementary oppositions of love grammar can be harmed here: Loving and being loved (activity and passivity) and love or hate (content opposition) are subjected to a third, more general opposition between loving and being indifferent. It is identified with presence and offer, absence translates into lack of love and indifference.

In this scenario, knowing how to manage indifference becomes a skill as crucial as it is cruel. This can be done either by suspending or by fixing one of the four points of support for the demand: asking, refusing, offering and denying. The point of return of the demand on itself, the point at which the child says "it's not that!", does not start a new series based on "I ask you”, but becomes an attitude, a subjective position. Life in the digital condominium creates walls of indifference based on the selectivity of offerings, filtered bytargets e big data, repeat previous choices, making the difference increasingly invisible. They reduce the size of the world which ends up increasing the size of the self. The exclusion of the disturbing other, the refusal of diversity and the bullyng digital are signs of this pathology of the grammar of demand.

(3) Desiring depression. The imperative of the loving offer in the presence, the eroticization of the refusal-indifference, facilitated by the digital language, can suture the interval in which the demand evolves to the desire with a kind of consolation of jouissance. Children emerge for whom video games and social networks are not only a cause, but a solution to the disappointment with the Other. Apathy, food selectivity, sleep difficulties, social restriction, obesity, narrowing the spectrum of interests are a familiar landscape.

We add here two structural features (a)abolia, difficulty initiating a cycle of behavior, disproportionate effort to give the first step how to get up in the morning, leave the house or fall asleep and (b) the anhedonia, loss of the ability to experience satisfaction, even if objective conditions for this are given. The arc of subjective work that articulates the experience of satisfaction and desire is reduced. Many digital devices are based on very simple series whose elementary grammar only becomes more extensive and accelerated, but not more complex, as in video games such as Candy Crush ou Minecraft. Simpler subjective work arcs, generically perceived as “highly addictive”, invite the child to “get out of breath”, to “act without thinking”, depressingly superimposing what is pleasant to what is desirable.

(4) Narrative deficit in the construction of intimacy. Desire depression is usually accompanied by the effects of identification, idealization and criticism. In children, this ends up making the moments of subjective assumption of a new image more difficult, in which it will be necessary to face the contingency and uncertainty of identity and body, which exposes us to the judgment of the Other. The typical indeterminacy of these moments opens the situation to what psychoanalysis calls transference, basically the reissue of requests retained throughout the subject's history in a new bond of knowledge and desire.

When we begin to narrate the story of our demands and share our uncertainties, they are transformed, giving rise to changes in our way of loving and asking. Digital life exposes children to interesting, varied and complex narratives. They serve as support for idealization and identification, but they do not always offer the conditions of personhood and uniqueness that transference requires. Animated like Pokemon, Yugi-Oh and Naruto are long stories, with infinite characters, based on the culture of honor, authority and shame.

This narrative structure does not always move to transference production, accentuating the typical childhood confusion between identification, love and desire. Youtubers how Kéfera and Cristian Figueiredo do it more effectively. The difficulty of narrating their own suffering, sharing it with others, problematizing their destinies, is connected with certain symptoms of an “active” lineage such as the cutting (cutting oneself to relieve anguish), the Binge (eating quickly and impulsively), anorexia (refusing to eat), bulimia (eating and vomiting afterwards), compulsion to consume (hoarders, addicts), when it does not directly affect speech as in selective mutism, which is on the rise among children oriental. The failure to establish experiences of intimacy is another effect of the refusal of experiences of indeterminacy and the excessive individualization of demand.

Digital life exposes children to interesting, varied and complex narratives. They serve as support for idealization and identification, but they do not always offer the conditions of personhood and uniqueness that transference requires.

The beneficial transitivist confusion between activity and passivity, the experimentation of the relations of possession, use and ownership, as well as the continuous sharing of future projects and past histories, can be avoided with digital resources. The ease of offering and exchanging intimacy in virtual spaces stimulates discursive forms and fantasy inferences far ahead of the real moment experienced by the participants, especially when dealing with children.

(5) Indeterminacy of Privacy and Authenticity. When digital media offer few experiences productive of indeterminacy increases for the child the identifying value of the experiences unproductive of indeterminacy. Use of fake profiles, anonymity mechanisms such as nicknames and avatars, group identifications, favor a regime of inconsistency in the relationship with the word and with the image, according to the Freudian formula of “I know but I keep acting like I don't know”. In this case, authentic and intimate attitudes are expressed through self-serving means. Humor is a solution to this division, yet those who fail to defend themselves in this way will be exposed to the effects of inconsequence with the word.

If the commitment to what is said becomes increasingly linked to the “current” conditions of its enunciation, we will be exposed to the suspicion that changes in route can be made at any time. Hence so many elusive or resentful children in the face of inauthentic privacy. Hence also so many children who suffer from attention wandering and a feeling of inadequacy to social contexts governed by the law of narcissistic performance. They refuse situations in which the rules are not “fluid” or quickly renegotiated, situations that cannot be undone with the speed of a click or that suggest excessive or undesirable intrusion. They thus suffer from a digitally accelerated version of the porcupine complex: if the other is too close, he “glues”, if he is too far away, he becomes indifferent. Mismatches in time, mismatches in intensity, misalignments of orientation, constitutive of a situation of intimacy, are poorly tolerated, as they are seen as signs of inauthenticity and unproductivity.

(6) Hypertrophy of narcissistic expectations of recognition. The manipulation of the self-image is the entry ticket to the digital world. Social networks have dramatically expanded our grammars of recognition by expanding our choices about the terms in which we want to be recognized. Forty years ago, changing the reconnaissance environment in which one lived was a difficult operation. The schoolmates were those, the street neighbors too, the family was a pillbox of positional identities. A hundred years ago a woman like Madame Bovary could have been slaughtered simply because she dared to dream of another life for herself. Being able to choose how, by whom and when one wants to be recognized creates tribes previously unlikely as grass lovers and self-amputators of the members themselves.

Small aphorisms create groups of identification: “It wasn't me, it was my lyrical self","Sometimes I pretend I understand","Non-practicing vegetarians" or "I never finished an eraser”. We can dream of being a character, musical or attitudinal, with millions of views, just telling our particular misery in a funny way. Along with this, the child lives with the unpleasant feeling that the lives of his friends and acquaintances are surrounded by a sea of ​​gratifications, stupendous accomplishments and endless successful experiences. Only those people she knows, really and personally, are failures and irrelevant.

Young people who laboriously pursue their dreams, facing compatible difficulties, feel themselves to be regrettable exceptions in a world that is unfairly difficult for them. The modification of impressions and the exaggeration of perspective, which only brings to light the “best moments” of each life, generate a mixture of disappointment and false promise. This brings with it the inevitable feeling of delay, impatience and restlessness whose basic enunciative form could be: “I haven't built anything, I'm 25 and still haven't… x".

Young people who laboriously pursue their dreams, facing compatible difficulties, feel themselves to be regrettable exceptions in a world that is unfairly difficult for them.

(7) Child digital intoxication. The digital loop of recognition requires the continued ingestion of poisonous substances filled with solutions to subjective conflicts. In these cases the intrusive presence of the Other as offer and incitement it is not just a contingency, but a condition without which the social and discursive bond does not happen. When the Other offers him nothing, the anguish of disappearance, the feeling of inexistence, the fall and the estrangement of the Other's place arise.

So the first sign of digital intoxication is the experience of selflessness. The feeling that the child has lost his ability to be with others. The selective reduction of the ability to affect oneself with the other presents itself as an alternation between intensification (for example, the situational stress of the game) and apathetic distress resolved by acts and behaviors, rather than by words and representations.

Instead of a reduction in symbolization or in the ability to fantasize, digital intoxication involves a kind of externalization of fantasizing, an open-air fantasizing, with a shuffling of intimacy, privacy and publicity. Hence a kind of retreat or avoidance in the face of conflict, or conversely, a kind of permanent negotiation of the rules. As in digital life, being with the other is exercising your mastery, the conflict stems from the fact that the rules of the virtual world are almost the same of the real world of which it is a part.

For example, talking to the other involves a time constraint. The other says, I must say something, at that time. If I still don't, my silence will be interpreted as a message. In digital communication it is Almost the same thing, but there is a noticeable difference: I can see the message and respond whenever I want, I can leave the other in doubt, I can create suspense or simulate my reception. All this as a kind of time lag.

Both desiring depression o narrative deficit they are effects of a transformation brought about by digital life in terms of the structure of knowledge. Knowledge, as well as the authority that derives from it, is always available and without interruption. There is no gap or interval necessary for the demand of the Other to be translated into the form “but what does he want in what he asks of me?” This knowledge without discontinuity also occurs in the grammar of addictions, in which the bond between procedures and satisfactions is guaranteed and secure, which does not suggest a causal relationship between digital life and addictions, but an intersubjective and language platform, for which ways of contemporary suffering such as depression, the deficit of intimacy or narrativity, as well as the difficulty of maintaining transferences.

Parents who use digital life as a peacemaker, who do not speak, are not interested in or participate in the symbolic universe it brings with it, who demonize digital culture, as if it were a drug or a bad company from which we must protect their children, are contributing directly or indirectly to their children's digital intoxication and to the dangerous belief that the devil is in objects and languages ​​and not in what we do with them.

When their children become inaccessible and unapproachable zombies, they usually fail to recognize how the digital world has only responded to or amplified the mode of relationship they themselves propose with love, with demand, with desire, with knowledge. Parents who use digital resources to exaggerate their narcissistic influence on their children, for example, to keep the false promise of infinite presence, create the eternal glow of a memoryless mind that they will later complain about.


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