Digital online communication and how it impacts on our face to face relationships
Setting up the group interview
Below is an e-mail I sent out in late October inviting participation in a time-limited online small group forum, with Rob White as the moderator/interviewer, around the theme of digital online communication and how it impacts on our face to face relationships. Eight people agreed to participate and we agreed to limit the group to four weeks. The group [Tiziana Baisini, Robert (Bob) Hsiung, Carla Penna, Maria Puschbeck, Liat Warhaftig-Aran, Haim Weinberg
Rob White (moderator), Peter Zelaskowski (organiser)] got going just before the Autumn Workshop in early November.
Rob White has written his “Impressions of an Online Group Discussing Online Groups” which can be accessed here:
You can also read the full text of our exchange by downloading the PDF: GASiDigitalGroup
Each participant has also agreed to write his/her reflections on the experience – these will be published in the March 2019 issue of Contexts.
Dear Colleague,
I am writing to you as the editor of Contexts, the newsletter of the Group-Analytic Society International, to ask whether you’d be interested in participating in a group discussion/interview on the theme of digital online communication and how it impacts on our face to face relationships. This would involve the setting-up of a temporary online forum (a Google group like the GASi Forum) for 6 weeks, during which it is hoped that 5 or 6 people would engage in a discussion on the theme. The aim is to produce a piece for publication in Contexts. Rob White, who has agreed to conduct and edit a series of individual and group interviews for Contexts, would act as the moderator/interviewer. Once the discussion is finished and the temporary forum is closed, Rob would distribute a draft copy of the discussion to all participants for final approval. For your information, I have agreed to be one of the participants. To get us started and to help us begin to think about this important contemporary theme, Rob has written an introduction.
Peter Zelaskowski
Introduction
At the Foulkes Large Group in London this year there was a palpable sense of anxiety around talk of the GASi Forum in particular, and social media in general. I have participated in other median or large groups, including the London Quarterly Members Group, where there has been a similar feeling of unease in this area. As soon as group members mention specific Forum posts or topics, the discussion immediately gets bogged down. One recurring difficulty arises when group members who aren’t on the Forum explain that they don’t know the details of what was said online. But there is also the problem that the specific issue which came up on the Forum quickly gets forgotten because people start talking about how un-group-analytic the whole business of Forum argument is. The Forum lacks physical immediacy, distinct time boundaries, the nuances of the spoken word and above all a certain politeness. As one of the people who isn’t on the Forum, I have to take other group members’ word for all of this. But what comes through clearly in what I have heard is, on the one hand, the fragmenting impact of this “other scene” of the Forum in the background, interfering with conventional groups; and, on the other hand, the experience of feeling bullied or silenced online (and indeed inevitably being silenced by not being online).
There is a poignant subtext to all of this, the melancholy and frustrating and disorienting experience of ageing. As far as I could tell, no one in the Foulkes Large Group grew up with social media. Everyone there had had in the previous decade to adjust to a New Digital World, more or less successfully, but always as an outsider rather than a native. I imagine everyone in that room had therefore had their own experiences of perplexed observation: seeing for the first time a baby in a buggy happily playing with an iPad, marvelling at a four-year-old’s intuitive mastery of touch-screen interfaces, noticing that everybody on a commuter train is looking at a smartphone. It isn’t easy having to be the outsider-witness of cultural change, but it is an inevitable part of growing older. Perhaps the emergence of the Internet is in its own way as disturbing for our era as war has been at other times. Maybe it is even more disturbing because it is less obviously catastrophic while still changing everything.
This ageing-as-an-outsider is, I suspect, the shared experience underlying the anxiety the Forum evokes in groups, and when the unease crops up it is tempting to retreat into the past. This happened during the Foulkes Large Group when someone longingly recalled a politically charged large group forty years earlier: by contrast, he said, the disappointing Foulkes Large Group seemed futile. I would go further and say the group felt imprisoned and lifeless, so great was its anxiety. No wonder nostalgia was therefore offered as a remedy – and no wonder it didn’t work. For unease and even “nameless dread” is the very stuff of life today, in and out of groups. Anxiety is how ourcivilisation’s (digital) discontent expresses itself. There is no getting away from it, and no going back to how groups were before various forums and online other scenes started undermining them. Does this mean the end of group analysis as we know it? Perhaps group analysis can pragmatically adapt to the new age? Or must it learn to live with a perpetual anxiety eating away at whatever is left of the way things used to be?
Rob White