Psychological effects of information technology use in relation to ontological security and embodied self (based on the study of undergraduates of humanitarian faculties)

The model of «normative» use of information technology (offered by V.A. Emelin, A.Sh. Tkhostov, E.I. Rasskazova) describes various psychological effects including changes of psychological boundaries and needs, and psychological dependence. The author of the article suggests that the list of such effects might contain disembodiment resulting from the lack of a person’s physical body due to their being on the aethyr and transformation of a person into an immaterial being (M. McLuhan). The new technological way of being-in-the-world is similar to a schizoid one, which R.D. Laing, a British psychologist and psychiatrist, relates to ontological insecurity, unembodiment (of the mental self in the body) and blurring of the existential boundaries between the «self» and «non-self». The authorial psychological construct of ontological security as a two-level system of experience, based on R.D. Laing’s conception, and authorial diagnostic procedures derived from this construct were used in the study. The first procedure was based on the principle of semantic differential «OS(SD)» and the second procedure was psychometric «OS(PM)». It was discovered that the group of students suffering from more pronounced consequences of normative use of mobile phones and prone to Internet-addicted behavior showed certain effect. It included a decline in manifestations of ontological security as experiencing existential props within and outside their selves, lower degree of existential antagonism (when existence is viewed as «a good life») and inflation of a false self linked to ontological insecurity and disembodiment. The analysis of the total sample revealed the selective nature of connections between the consequences of normative use of mobile phones and ontological security. In particular, a decline of the latter was associated with increasing changes in psychological borders. They involved the changes in the reflection of personal privacy during the expansion and erosion of the psychological borders, and the changes in the use of these conditions to simplify and secure communication with other people.