The Virtual Machine
Images of the Virtual
A Dis-Intimity at Work
By Angélique GozlanEnglish
The internet has created a new world in which the private / public pair has been reshaped. What interests us is to examine what is at stake, psychically speaking, for those adolescents who are faced with this virtual world. Taking the case of Amanda Todd, an adolescent who committed suicide following the consequences of showing an intimate part of her body on the net, we look again at the notion of intimacy on the screen. A new visibility of the subject is constituted in a permanent exchange with the other party. We put forward the notion of “dis-intimacy” in order to broach what is at stake in putting oneself on show in this way on the screen.
Keywords
- adolescence
- virtual
- intimacy
- extimacy
- dis-intimacy