Our Screens Are Making Us Dissociate
If being online makes you feel detached from your sense of self, you’re not alone
In her bestselling memoir Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener describes life inside the tech industry and the toll it took on her, and the world.
“My impulse, over the past few years, had been to remove myself from my own life, to watch from the periphery and try to see the vectors, the scaffolding, the systems at play,” she writes of her time in startup land. “Psychologists might refer to this as dissociation; I considered it the sociological approach.”
She’s not the only one thinking about dissociation — a rupture in your relationship to your thoughts, behaviors, emotions, actions, and even your identity or sense of self. In recent years, dissociation has transcended its academic origins and become a catchall term for our modern malaise — a single word for the good moments, the bad, and the times you can’t tell the difference. Whether you’re having an out-of-body experience or simply spacing out in a boring meeting, dissociation describes a diverse range of experiences with a variety of triggers. But Wiener’s book suggests a technological component to our collective dissociation — as though the platforms on which we discuss dissociation could be driving the feeling itself.
