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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 15 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1407586
This article is part of the Research Topic Digitalization and Mental Health: Challenges and Ethical Aspects View all 5 articles
Fracturing the Affordance Space: An Account of Digitalized Alienation
Provisionally accepted- 1 The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, United States
- 2 University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota, United States
This paper investigates the lived experience of alienation as a form of mental strife or pathology as it is connected to the digitalization of modern life. To do so, I deploy the concept of affordances from ecological psychology, phenomenology, and embodied cognition. I propose an affordance-based model for understanding digitalized alienation. First, I argue that the lived sense of alienation is best understood as a fracturing of the affordance space, where possibilities for action are lived as disconnected from one another and therefore from one's personal development and search for meaning. Using this model, I show how the process of digitalization can lead to a lived sense of alienation for modern subjects. On this model, digitalization is alienating insofar as it fractures the affordance space into disconnected fields that invite determinate, separate, repeatable tasksswiping, clicking, scrolling, etc. -rather than offering opportunities for the development of new cognitive and bodily skills that are mutually informing and enriching across different affordance fields.
Keywords: Alienation, digitalization, affordances, Phenomenology, the self, embodiment, Embodied Cognition, Ecological Psychology. (Min Font: (Default) Times New Roman
Received: 26 Mar 2024; Accepted: 24 Jul 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Butler. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Michael Butler, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, United States
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