Development in the Digital Age

ABSTRACT

The author highlights the massive cultural transformation of the 21st century as society moves into the technocultural age. The papers that follow represent a range of viewpoints about the impact of these changes on child development in the technocultural era, with special reference to the unique presentations of childhood symptomatology.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital age
• child development
• psychoanalytic treatment of children in the 21st century

Notes

1. I borrow here secondhand a comment from the movie Die Hard: “You are an analog alarm clock in a digital era,” used to excellent effect in Bonaminio’s chapter: “‘A Perfect World’ and Its Imperfections” (Lemma and Caparrotta 2014).

2. Thanks to Elm Exchange for this chronology.

3. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horn_and_Hardart_Children%27s_Hour for more.

4. See http://inventors.about.com/od/kidactivities/a/children_tv.htm.

5. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_television

6. See http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/new-report-finds-rapid-growth-in-childrens-app-market

7. Indeed the advent of video games coincides with a dramatic decline in the per-capita homicide and nonnegligent manslaughter rate (Ferguson 2010).

8. Graham (2013) reminded us that Freud linked the origin of the word trauma to the Greek verb to pierce.

9. Such as Akhtar (2011), Lemma and Caparrotta (2014), Psychoanaytic Dialogues (2015, Vol. 25, Issue 4), International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2015, Vol. 96, Issue 3); and the 49th IPA Congress, July 22–25, 2015, Boston, MA (“Changing World: The Shape and Use of Psychoanalytic Tools Today”).

10. Borrowing the title from Stefan Zweig’s memoir hints, I fear, at the level of anxiety this transformation engenders!

11. See http://www.esrb.org/about/video-game-industry-statistics.jsp

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Gilmore

Dr. Karen Gilmore is an adult, child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and Training and Supervising Analyst at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is also Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia. Dr. Gilmore has published a number of papers and chapters on a range of clinical topics, such as play, developmental theory, adoption, sexual development and gender identity disorder, and attention deficit disorder. With co-author Pamela Meersand, she has written three volumes: Normal Child and Adolescent Development: A Psychodynamic Primer for APPI (2013), The Little Book of Child and Adolescent Development for Oxford University Press (2014) and the forthcoming Play Therapy in the 21st Century for APPI.