The phenomenon of anxiety in the digital culture

Dialogues with clinical phenomenology

Abstract

New technologies, linked to the massive presence of the internet, have brought significant changes to people's daily lives on a global scale. As we spend more and more time online, our contact with the world has also become mediated by screens, leading us to question the impacts of digital culture on human life and its intersection with contemporary forms of suffering, such as anxiety. In this work, we aim to understand the phenomenon of anxiety in its intertwining with digital culture through a critical perspective situated in the field of phenomenological psychopathology. To this end, we conducted a bibliographic research study through a theoretical essay. In the face of hyperstimulation, anxiety is understood as an intersubjective phenomenon situated at the intersection between subject and culture, especially in the configuration of digital culture. It was evident that the current anxious experience cannot be reduced to a linear causal relationship with culture, but rather understood as an ambiguous and constitutive intertwining between the self-other-world, where the exposure to the logic of performance and temporal acceleration modulate the conditions of possibility of psychopathological experience. As a result, there is a clear need for a critical, ethical, and comprehensive clinical approach, capable of incorporating the intersubjective and cultural dimensions into sensitive listening to experiences and configurations of anxiety in the contemporary world. This perspective points to a break with practices focused on mere adjustment, pathologization, and adaptation of subjects to the logic of production and performance, revealing the ways in which the digitally mediated world can stiffen or restrict the conditions of possibility of human existence.