Social Technology in Its Spiritual and Relational Contexts: Yearning, Paradox, and the Power of Grief
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article draws on bodies of theory within contemporary psychoanalysis and the sociology of religion to theorize social technologies in their psychological and spiritual contexts. It argues that the voracious uptake of social technologies is animated largely by spiritual and attachment yearnings for intimate contact between authentic selves. Maintaining intense relational intimacy requires the capacity to occasionally turn away one’s gaze, to retreat from active social contact. However, technology companies, in their pursuit of continuous user engagement, design their social technology products specifically to block this periodic retreat. The tremendous psychological energies that propel us toward digital life can in this way become trapped and frenzied, as they lose the grounding experience of contracting, unbuilding, turning away, and returning to within. What results is one of the profound dilemmas of modern times. Recent shifts in American religious life, namely the ascent of the “spiritual but not religious,” also involve the pursuit of intimate interpersonal contact experienced as sacrality, what I describe as the “sacralization of the intimate edge.” This article explores these related yearnings and dilemmas across technological and spiritual realms of experience, with a particular focus on how the “spiritual but not religious” tend to embrace the periodic retreat, or “reverse-routinization,” as a core feature of their spiritual process. I argue that in clinical work with patients, what can emerge for them from this technological paradox is grief. And the forward edge in this case is not alleviating the paradox or the grief that comes of it, but rather, their coming to experience the grief and the affective landscape that this opens up.
Source: Psychoanalytic Inquiry
Author: Steven Barrie-Anthony
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7221524044