One important cultural phenomenon concerning virtuality and adolescence may be the latter’s addiction to brand names.
Like the image, the brand, a modern equivalent of mythology, could be both an object and a relation. This would transform the perspective from which it is analyzed, particularly with regard to the bonds that adolescents maintain with brand names.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Virtuel – 2004 T.22 n°1
Bernard Guillot : computer-assisted psychotherapy, PsyaO
PsyaO, “ computer-assisted psychotherapy ”, is legitimized when the virtual game, by stimulating faulty insight, provides an imaginary dynamic graft that can awaken the numbed depressive or the child who is failing out of school … The parent can be reinserted via the ludic interactive relation that liberates vital energy through the pleasure shared with the therapist.
Thomas Gaon : video games, the future of an illusion
The technology of the virtual produces an area of illusion that is more and more captivating and engaging for adolescents faced with a reality that is sometimes experienced with anxiety. Video games are the royal road into this parallel domain, particularly through its implications for creativity, sublimation and identity. They play out the fantasy in an interactive form that combines activity and passivity. In adolescence, the incarnation of the heroes of video games based on the infantile heroic identification in its narcissistic dimension (ideal ego) would help to compensate for the loss of parental objects. But, the positive and subjectivating contribution of virtual identity depends on the permeability of this ludic sphere. The richness of the exchange between internal and external realities within this transitional area hinges on the real and reflexive presence of the other, so that the circuit of instances in play can be operative.
Josette Sultan : the virtual image does not exist, construction of an imaginary world
The “ virtual ” image does not exist, any more than the worlds it is supposed to generate. The orthodoxy – and some“ learned ” voices – are doing their best to smudge the lines between the real, the imaginary and what belongs to visual representation. To what purpose ? Here, high school students, when asked about the notion of the “ virtual ” compare their experience with the creation of digital images with representations they are elaborating and with values circulation in the social imagination. A meditation on what has become a “ passion for ignorance ”.
Serge Tisseron : the virtual in adolescence, its mythologies, its fantasies, and its uses
The word “ virtual ” has at least three possible definitions : that which is potential and in the process of becoming, that which is present but not actualized at a given moment, and that which excludes the body and its turmoil. In all these cases, the virtual establishes itself as a fantasy wherein the desire to be contained in the image, to interact with it, and finally to swap skins with it are all mobilized at the same time. But sometimes, virtual encounters are also used by adolescents as transitional spaces for the purposes of personal symbolization.