On this week’s podcast, Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist and author based at Stanford University, discusses his new book, Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality. Aboujaoude says that the internet has positive effects, but he’s worried that most of our day-to-day online activities are negatively affecting us. He explains how, in his view, behaviors like compulsive online shopping and angry commenting on blogs is seeping into our offline lives, with profound negative effects. He also talks about why he thinks the internet is different from previous technologies that caused techno-fear, why he thinks it’s often difficult for online norms to develop, and what he thinks proper roles are for medicine, psychiatry, and government in the online sphere.
Related Links
- “The Information: How the Internet gets inside us,” The New Yorker
- “Attention loss feared as high-tech rewires brain,”The San Francisco Chronicle
- “The Computer Made Me Do It,” The New York Times
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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