Primary Process Online in the Age of the Internet

When I joined the age of online communication some years ago, one of the first things that I noted was a rather relaxed superego. Online the rules of capitalization, salutation, spelling, and grammar in general are often ignored

Page 41

or applied sporadically. It was a culture shock to be written to without any formal address or even a name at the end of the document. Seldom did I find my high school teachers’ rule that an author should never use the first person singular in writing other than an autobiography. (In itself this does not bother me since I always personalize my own writing and encourage our authors to do the same.) In many parts of the Net, e-mailers wrote only from their gut emotion rather than from their considered reason. The variety of e-mail signatures, some held by the same person, reflected an ability to reinvent oneself with an ease not found offline.

Primary process is the psychoanalytic term that this behavior brought to mind. Primary process is the uninhibited land of the pleasure principle which we all come into the world expecting to live in after our nine months in utero when we were provided for without our own efforts. We pursue the pleasure principle above all else until Mom, Dad, Teacher, Siblings, and Reality force us to accept that we can only get what we want part of the time, and that it makes sense to find pleasure wherever we can, rather than only in our first choice.

The intensity of the “let it all hang out” attitude that I experienced on e-mail led me to wonder if the pleasure principle was not dominant. Online in the uncensored mailing list discussion groups, such as the one on psychohistory, I found that some people participated with little regard for academic achievement, the realities of age, prior reputation as a scholar, or anything outside of themselves. People came with their own thoughts and fantasies about a subject, and these were treated by many subscribers on an equal basis with the results of serious research. Some wanted us experienced psychohistorians to answer their questions as if psychohistory were a mathematical science as in Asimov’s fantasy psychohistory. They were introduced to the word psychohistory by the prolific science popularizer and science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov. Several fans of Asimovian psychohistory went beyond this position by participating in the real-life psychohistory that scholars and psychoanalysts have been creating throughout the 20th century.

I have great respect for fantasy, as does anyone trained in psychoanalysis. If we can imagine something, we may be able to do it. But it is extremely important to know the difference between fantasy and reality, and online this difference is far more readily blurred than in daily life. How does one know if the person writing is a proven expert in her/his field, or just someone expressing an unconsidered opinion? Recently, someone on the Psychohistory Mailing List felt compelled to make the case that there are such things as facts, since opinions were being expressed so readily without regard to evidence.

Technologies change our ways of looking at the world and become a part of the metaphors that we use. The impact of the changes in case, spelling, grammar, and so forth which we are beginning to observe in online communication can- not yet be determined at this early stage of the communication transformation which we are living through. If we look to some of the ways in which the concept of book has permeated our society, it is nothing short of amazing. When I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) I found an amazing array of words that reflected the history of the book’s impact on our society. (I am tempted to say I will “make book”—make a bet—on a similar impact of online communication.)

Let me give just some of the many uses and derivatives of the word book in the OED: “book-answerer” (a critic), “book-board” (“book shelf in pew or pulpit”), “book-credit” (“amount credited to person’s account in a ledger”), “book-house” (a library), “book law” (written law), “book-leiger” (“one who confines his study to book learning”), “book-mate” (fellow student), “book-matter” (“a matter the adequate treatment of which would fill a book”), “book-money” (surplus fees), “book-oath” (“an oath sworn on the ‘book’”), “book-post” (“the system and regulations under which books and printed matter may be sent through the post-office”), and “booked” (“entered in a book, registered; engaged”). Though there was a reference to “bookie,” it did not include a taker of bets which was the illegal profession of my late Uncle Louie. (OED, Compact Edition, Vol. I, 1971: pp. 988-992)

Books are not blank, but the product of writing. In the OED a few of the numerous words that grew up around the process of writing are: “writ” (“something written, penned, or recorded in writing”), “writative” (“disposed to write; given or addicted to writing”), “write-off” (“a printed form with blanks”), and “write-up” (“a written account or description commending or praising a person or thing”). (OED, II 1971: pp. 375-381)

A sampling of OED references to read are: “read” (“an act of perusal; a spell of reading; a loan

Page 42

of a book”), “read” (“to have an idea, to think or suppose that”), “read” (“to make out or discover the meaning or significance of”), “read” (“to foresee, foretell, predict”), “read” (“to see, discern, distinguish”), “read” (“to inspect and interpret in thought”), and many, many more. (OED, II, 1971: pp. 193-197)

As with books, I have no doubt that a vast number of terms will develop around the new technology of writing and reading online using computers. Indeed, some terms that come to mind are bytes, flame wars, online, software, URL, World Wide Web, virtual reality, cyberspace, real-time, and browser. (See our glossary of words used in this mode of communication on page 69.) If I am wrong about this prediction, I suspect that it will only be because the Internet is replaced by some as yet unforeseen technology.

The computer, e-mail, and the Internet have changed the way I write as a historian, psychohistorian, political psychologist, and as an editor. My involvement in the computer and Internet Age came in 1986 at the prompting of a colleague who asked, “Are you still using quill, ink, and parchment?” Computing frightened me because it meant typing, and before computers I was an incredibly slow, hopeless typist who ended up with a messy document. Hardly a line I typed was without blurred print over Whiteout correction fluid. Now, a reader could wrongfully assume that I am a first-rate typist thanks to my ability to correct innumerable mistakes made by my errant fingers. The page setup and spell check options on computers further improve my work. (Many of my students use grammar checks to bring their writing into conformity with standard English.)

More than anything else, my work as an editor benefits from this new technology. When I have an idea for a special issue, I can e-mail it to Bob Lentz and other respected colleagues for their input. Next, I can send the idea to a large variety of individuals and Web sites in the search for authors—usually answering queries very quickly. Correspondence that used to take weeks now can be done in hours. Rather than retyping manuscripts sent to me on paper, now I request them electronically which greatly speeds up the editing process. I suggest changes in square brackets and usually get the authors to write in conformity with the style of our publication. Instead of only having the responses of referees who are local, I can delete the names and biographies of the authors and electronically send the submissions to referees all around the world. The ease and speed of the process has helped me publish three times as much as I did before I used this technology. Clio’s Psyche has grown from an eight-page newsletter in 1994 to a refereed quarterly which has been 40 or 48 pages of late and has attracted authors from Harvard to Hong Kong and Brazil to Russia.

Along with the advantages, there are certainly many difficulties involved with the new technology. First, there is the feeling of total incompetence that I experienced as I tried to figure out how to use a computer keyboard. A patient friend received innumerable calls from me that began, “Hello, this is Paul with another dumb computer question.” (I could have said “simple

Page 43

question,” but I certainly felt dumb.) Next, as soon as one technology is mastered, another technology comes along and you are often forced to go through that learning stage again. For example, I have had to acquire a working knowledge of three different word processing application software systems over the years. I was able to do this because computer software has been getting more and more “user-friendly.”

Another difficulty is the possibility of having your computer infected with viruses that sometimes spread with the rapidity of colds or the great influenza epidemic of 1919 that killed millions. At my college, we went through a period of spreading viruses back and forth before we learned how to protect against them. I became vigilant about viruses after one “boot virus” made it impossible for me to start up, or “boot” my home computer. Most of the virulent viruses in the news these days are passed over the Internet as attached files. The last one I followed in the media was spread when people opened documents that offered something to do with sex. (AIDS is far from the only “disease” spread due to the human fascination with sex!)

The physical costs of working at a computer should not be ignored. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome may not have affected me, but I have been changing my glasses with growing frequency, and the only thing tougher on my sciatic leg than sitting at the computer is driving in gridlocked New York City traffic from a Psychohistory Forum meeting.

Any discussion of the downside would be incomplete without noting that I have been known to declare on frequent occasions, “Computers and the Internet are the biggest time wasters known to humankind!” Computers can be as time wasting as they are helpful. Tasks that would have taken hours with an older technology can be reduced to minutes, but the reverse is true as well. E-mail took so much time that I had to set a rule, frequently violated, that I would only spend a half-hour reading and responding to e-mail in the morning, which is my most productive time for writing. High-quality mailing list discussion groups on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism were so time consuming that I have reluctantly had to drop out.

When I examine our society’s collective fears about the computer, I note that they are usually focused on the Y2K problem (the fear of a year 2000 computer collapse). Many things come to mind. First, how we managed to give a concrete, solvable form to our millennial fears about the year 2000. Second, how we managed to quantify the fear by focusing on how many computer programmers need to be hired to correct the problem. Third, how we managed to become bored by the very words Y2K or the millennial bug. Hidden beneath all this concrete concern is our very real anxiety over our dependency on computers and other technologies whose input we only partially understand. For example, our boredom with Y2K enables us temporarily to deny the underlying fears. However, if we focus too much on these problems, we risk losing sight of the incredible increase of competence and capability that we have created in such a short period of time.

Despite the downside to computers, I would no sooner give them up in my work than I would go back to the ways of our ancestors, drawing pictographs on rock walls. Computers, and the problems accompanying them, are simply a vital part of my life. A world electronic community has been established through the Internet that brings people together in unique ways. People from Russia and all over our small planet e-mail me and the Psychohistory Mailing List asking questions, especially during crises such as the 1999 NATO air war against Yugoslavia. As a way of lessening the dehumanization of the Serbs—and of Americans by Serbs—during this war I arranged with a Serbian exchange student for my students to e-mail Serbian students about what was involved. (The war stopped before we could put this into effect.)

As a historian, if I want to know where the American Historical Association (AHA) is holding its next meeting, I simply search on the World Wide Web at <www.theaha.org>. If I want to present at its yearly conference, its Web site will connect me with a variety of panels to whose chairs I can submit a proposal. I can go to the Web site of the IPA, or of the ISPP, <ispp.org>, and get valuable information about the field and the organization. In fact, the ISPP provided the information on the convention hotel I stayed at in Amsterdam.

There are few commercial items that I pick up these days that do not have a Web site. See <www.iht.com> for the International Herald Tribune and <www.consumerreports.org> for Consumer Reports. Increasingly, governmental and private sector institutions also have Web sites. One of our goals is to have a Clio’s Psyche and

Page 44

Psychohistory Forum Web site before the new millennium. After all, my team teacher and I have a Web site for our course, Leaders, Passion, and Success, why not have one for the Forum? It is noteworthy that organized psychoanalysis and many individual psychoanalysts appear to be lagging behind other professions in the use of computers and the Internet. My entry into the electronic age came about as a professor and scholar, not a psychoanalyst.

Electronic connection is changing our world and it is certainly not limited to the Internet. For several years now I’ve noted people talking away as I walked up or down the hill between Ramapo’s academic buildings and the parking lot. At first I thought they were talking to me since no one else was around, and then I realized that they were on their cell phones which have been proliferating with the regularity of weeds in my garden. To me, cell phones have been about as unwelcome as those weeds when they have been used in doctors’ waiting rooms, restaurants, and a variety of other locations in which I am used to a person facing the person they are talking with or enjoying quiet contemplation.

Recently in Paris, I was utterly amazed by the number of people of all ages walking down the street while being connected to another human being on a cell phone. A Frenchman commented, “If you think this is bad, go to Italy where everyone has a cell phone!” This morning’s New York Times reveals that his information is incorrect since only 36% of Italians have cell phones, even if last month “a communication threshold” was crossed with more Italians having cell phones than telephone lines. The Finns, who previously had been the only country with more cell phones than land-line telephones, hold the record for cell phone ownership with 57% possession. Americans are not rated in the top ten percentage of cell phone ownership. At 24.7%, we are a mere 18th in worldwide ownership. The author reports that the descendants of the ancient Romans love theorizing about their cell phone addiction and quotes one addict as saying, “We Italians don’t respect limits” and “I have friends who use their cell phones just to call their mothers three times a day.” When an Italian journalist calls these phones “a high-tech umbilical cord,” it rings a bell since I have been saying this about many people’s use of all telephones for over two decades. (Alexandra Stanley, “Cell Phone Craze Has Italy Humming,” New York Times, August 5, 1999: p. A8) In addition, these telephone lines are now being connected to the Internet as a way of bringing together not only families, but also formerly diverse individuals and groups. Edryce Reynolds, one of our authors, finds e-mailing to be like chatting, while Camille Pierce reports that some families “speak to each other on computers and then follow up on personal issues such as an emotional crisis by using conventional telephones.” (April 15, 1999, e-mail communication)

We are at an early stage of understanding the psychological meaning of this drive to stay connected. Mothers buy cell phones for their teenagers to stay in touch with them and be assured that their kids are safe. Security is an important justification for the phones, but the needs satisfied are far more than security. My little grandson often asks, “Where is Mommy?” … “Where is Daddy?” … “Where is Grandpa?” … and “Where is Sister?” This need to know the whereabouts of your loved ones, which is so striking and direct in a child who will be two years old tomorrow, is present in adults of all ages. Cell phones also contribute to the frantic activity of our society enabling people to do two things at once. They also enable people to ward off feelings of depression or loneliness by connecting with someone else. Even when they begin the conversation saying, “I’m lonely” or “I’m depressed,” they are usually avoiding getting at the root causes of these emotions as they would in therapy. Thus, this constant calling is usually part of the manic defense style that abounds in our society. Perhaps, I should add “telephone therapy” to the substitute therapy list (“boyfriend therapy,” “shopping therapy,” “travel therapy”) that Mel Goldstein and I used to joke about at Forum lunches.

The electronic invasion of privacy should be of concern to all of us. Teenagers need some quiet space without being checked on by Mom. In the era before the pager and the cell phone, the late Sid Halpern of Temple University used to wonder if thinking was not more profound in the 19th century before the telephone began to disturb our concentration. In this age of beeping pagers and ringing cell phones, of being connected to the Internet, and of taking portable computers on vacation to get e-mail, we are interrupted constantly by people using electronics. We are also losing the distinction between home and work. We need individually to take the approach of the Rive Restaurant in Amsterdam which requires patrons to check or turn off their cell phones and

Page 45

pagers before entering.

In conclusion, primary process—the pleasure principle—is certainly stronger online than in ordinary communication. However, the superego is always lurking in the vicinity. Newcomers so often come to online discussions expecting to confirm their preconceived fantasies about a subject, especially one as unknown to most as psychohistory, only to discover that a substantial reality precedes their presence. Though “work and love,” as Freud put it, may be the road to happiness; online, when all is said and done, there is far more room for work than love—beyond a love of knowledge.

Our readers will find that numerous psychological issues are raised in the articles. We have organized this Communication in Cyberspace special theme into five parts: (1) the introduction, (2) the uses—the advantages and disadvantages, (3) theory and philosophy, (4) the conclusion and (5) the glossary. Among these sections readers will find materials on psychosocial implications (Golden), counseling (Bernet), personality types (Livingood), collegial relationships (Simms), adapting to innovation (the Changs), intimacy (Elovitz), and a variety of other subjects. Rather than speak for the authors of this unique effort to understand the psychology of online communication, we will let them speak for themselves. We welcome letters to the editor on this (and every) subject; and recognize that a full psychology of online communication has yet to be written.

Page 46