How Psychotherapists Practice In the Digital Era

The digital era, marked by digital devices connected via high speed data networks, has altered human experience in profound ways over the past 40 years. The potential for novel forms of human relating and fulfillment of desire has led to myriad changes in behavior, thought and unconscious activity. While many adapt or thrive in expanded reality, for some, the digital can be context, source and/or location for psychological affliction. When those who suffer seek psychological relief, how psychotherapists listen for, conceptualize and work with the effects of the digital matter a great deal. While theoretical and quantitative research literature exists at a population level, there is little study of how analytically oriented psychotherapists practice in light of the technological world. This dissertation used an interpretive qualitative method with a small sample (n=6) to explore in depth how analytically oriented clinicians based in New York City in Spring 2019 and Fall 2020 are responding to this phenomena. Results suggest that therapists tend to use existing theory and clinical methods to guide treatment, but to varying degrees are attuned to new or extreme presentations of symptomology that finds expression in digital modes. Younger therapists and those that include Lacan as part of their theoretical orientation were more agile in hearing traces of the digital both in manifest and latent aspects of patient communication and linking them conceptually to sometimes novel methods of working with such effects. The inclusion of factors unique to the technological era in clinical training, a treatment method for digital illness, and two novel theoretical constructs informed by the literature reviewed and interviews, the Virtual Cathexis and Techno-shame, are proposed

Toward a Theory of Consumer Interaction With Mobile Technology Devices

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore the phenomenon of consumer interaction with mobile technology devices (MTDs). MTDs include electronic “gadgets” such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smartphones that are carried and used frequently by consumers. The emphasis in this dissertation was on developing an explanatory framework to account for everyday experiences of MTD consumption. In light of limited consumer research on the pervasive phenomenon, an inductive, theory-building approach was taken, employing the constant comparative methodology of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Glaser 1978). Data was gathered primarily through in-depth interviews with 20 participants who had extensive familiarity with the phenomenon. Convergence on a “core category” of Cultivating the Self explained the majority of variance in participants‟ social psychological processes while interacting with MTDs. By Cultivating the Self, consumers interact intimately with mobile technology devices in myriad ways over time, investing “psychic energy” (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981) into the products in order to actualize goals and therefore actualize themselves, all the while becoming closer to the devices, both figuratively and literally. The core category is comprised of three interrelated stages: Transitioning, Integrating and Bonding. By Transitioning to their devices, consumers undergo a fundamental and totalizing “ecological” change in their lives as they come to understand and assimilate interactions with MTDs. Through Integrating their devices, consumers select and align activities in their daily lives with capabilities that arise from interacting with their MTDs, “offloading” tasks to the products in a process that blurs the distinction between “personal” and “professional” lives. By Bonding, consumers make the products “their own” as they become increasingly proximate and intimate with their MTDs through customizing, personifying and interacting playfully with them. Extant theory was considered in extending properties of the core category, with special attention given to the ontological and epistemological differences between structuralist and interactionist paradigms underlying prior research on human-object relations. A symbolic interactionist view of human behavior was demonstrated as supporting emergent conceptualizations of the phenomenon. The interactionist approach and emergent theory developed through this dissertation provides support for the Service-Dominant Logic views currently evolving in contemporary marketing thought

Artificial general intelligence: Proceedings of the Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2009, Arlington, Virginia, USA, March 6-9, 2009

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI – to create broad human-like and transhuman intelligence, by exploring all available paths, including theoretical and experimental computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and innovative interdisciplinary methodologies. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called narrow AI – the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks. In recent years, however, more and more researchers have recognized the necessity – and feasibility – of returning to the original goals of the field. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of human level intelligence and more broadly artificial general intelligence

Foundations of Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems

This open access book coherently gathers well-founded information on the fundamentals of and formalisms for modelling cyber-physical systems (CPS). Highlighting the cross-disciplinary nature of CPS modelling, it also serves as a bridge for anyone entering CPS from related areas of computer science or engineering. Truly complex, engineered systems—known as cyber-physical systems—that integrate physical, software, and network aspects are now on the rise. However, there is no unifying theory nor systematic design methods, techniques or tools for these systems. Individual (mechanical, electrical, network or software) engineering disciplines only offer partial solutions. A technique known as Multi-Paradigm Modelling has recently emerged suggesting to model every part and aspect of a system explicitly, at the most appropriate level(s) of abstraction, using the most appropriate modelling formalism(s), and then weaving the results together to form a representation of the system. If properly applied, it enables, among other global aspects, performance analysis, exhaustive simulation, and verification. This book is the first systematic attempt to bring together these formalisms for anyone starting in the field of CPS who seeks solid modelling foundations and a comprehensive introduction to the distinct existing techniques that are multi-paradigmatic. Though chiefly intended for master and post-graduate level students in computer science and engineering, it can also be used as a reference text for practitioners

Interacting with television : morning talk-TV and its communicative relationship with women viewers

This thesis presents a unique interdisciplinary approach to gender and mass communication within the field of media and cultural studies. It evolves from a trend in media research that understands broadcasting as a communicative event which involves the creation of new and different forms of social action and interaction in a modem world (Meyrowitz, 1985; Thompson, 1995; Scannell, 1989; 1991; Moores, 2000). It investigates women's involvement with television discourse concentrating on morning talk programming in Britain which presents a concentration of talk shows and magazine programmes. These programmes are chosen specifically because in dealing with issues that are usually contained within the personal and private domain they often privilege the voices of 'ordinary' people and women in particular. It is argued that their personalised stylistic features produce textual strategies which position the viewer as also 'participator'. The research also involves a, broadly speaking, 'ethnographic' approach, viewing programmes with women in their homes and recording their responses alongside the text. This original methodology produces an analysis of text/audience interaction that concentrates on the motivation of a particular style of 'feminine' discourse, which can articulate the personal and private. As such, I emphasise the importance of the women's voices in the construction of the viewing experience which uniquely establishes a 'mediated conversational floor'. The research finds that through the interaction encouraged by the texts, the women respond producing their own relevant subjective experience that is significant as a modern phenomenon of self-reflexivity and identity construction

That Others May Learn: Three Views on Vicarious Learning in Organizations.

Vicarious learning, the process by which an individual learns from another’s experience, has long been recognized as a source of development and performance improvement in organizations, at both individual and collective levels. Yet existing perspectives on this critical learning process have been fairly limited, typically casting vicarious learning as a simple process of observation and imitation, enabled by formal organizational knowledge-transfer conduits. Largely absent from prior approaches is a consideration of the interpersonal dynamics underlying vicarious learning, leaving unexplored important questions related to 1) the actual behaviors unfolding when individuals interact to learn from one another’s experience, 2) how people coordinate efforts to enact and facilitate these vicarious learning interactions, and 3) the performance impact of different patterns of engagement in these interactions. In this dissertation, I advance a perspective on vicarious learning that views it as relationally co-created, emergently organized, and dyadically reciprocal, exploring the issues identified above in three distinct chapters. First, I present a theoretical model of what I term coactive vicarious learning, integrating theories of experiential learning and symbolic interactionism to articulate a co-construction process of vicarious learning, arising from individuals’ discussion and shared meaning-making. I unpack the antecedents and underlying behaviors of these discursive vicarious learning interactions, and theorize that they not only increase individuals’ knowledge, but also build individual and relational capacity for future learning. Second, I present a qualitative study of how these vicarious learning interactions manifest at work, inductively exploring the organizing processes used to facilitate vicarious learning in air medical transport teams. I advance a view of vicarious learning not as wholly determined by formal structures, but rather as an emergently organized phenomenon, enacted through interpersonal storytelling and facilitated by the coalescence of informal practices and formal structures. Third, I present a quantitative examination of different distributions of vicarious learning in work teams. Specifically, I examine what leads individuals to engage in reciprocal vicarious learning relationships (where each individual learns from the other, in contrast to the prevailing view of vicarious learning as one-way information transfer) and demonstrate that greater reciprocation of vicarious learning within a team enhances performance.PhDBusiness AdministrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113410/1/cgmyers_1.pd

Mankind is Machine: A Monstrous Posthuman Reading of Philip K. Dick’s Selected Works

The works of Philip K. Dick act as an ideal template for readers to explore what it means to be human in a technologically dominated world. Dick’s emphasis on the usage of androids and artificial intelligence as literary monsters allows for a posthuman reading of the traditional literary monster, notably in how their uncanny nature and behavior helps reveal the synthetic tendencies of humanity. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, “Imposter,” and “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,” each narrative incorporates artificial intelligence and androids acting as others to reveal the machine-like qualities of Dick’s human characters. This approach ultimately reveals Dick’s greater commentary on the nature of humanity’s tendencies to fall into machine-like patterns and expectations within the historical world. By asking questions of what it means to be human through posthuman monsters, Dick challenges the traditional definition of what it means to be both human and alive