
Virtually You
The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
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Narrated by:
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Teddy Canez
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By:
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Elias Aboujaoude
About this listen
A penetrating examination of the insidious effects of the Internet on our personalities - online and off.
Whether sharing photos or following financial markets, many of us spend a shocking amount of time online. While the Internet can enhance well-being, Elias Aboujaoude has spent years treating patients whose lives have been profoundly disturbed by it. Part of the danger lies in how the Internet allows us to act with exaggerated confidence, sexiness, and charisma. This new self, which Aboujaoude dubs our "e-personality", manifests itself in every curt email we send, Facebook "friend" we make, and "buy now" button we click. Too potent to be confined online, however, e-personality traits seep offline, too, making us impatient, unfocused, and urge-driven, even after we log off.
Virtually You uses examples from Aboujaoude's personal and professional experience to highlight this new phenomenon. The first scrutiny of the virtual world's transformative power on our psychology, Virtually You shows us how real life is being reconfigured in the image of a chat room, and how our identity increasingly resembles that of our avatar.
©2011 Elias Aboujaoude, MD (P)2011 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
Should be a prerequisite for using the internet
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Very Informative
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Is there anything you would change about this book?
I would have liked to hear more anecdotes from the author, rather than a psychiatrist explaining technical details of internet.The virtual you sounds scarier than it probably is
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Fine, the narration is bad; that's not the author's fault. So how does this book stand up on content? At best, it is an outsider's misunderstanding of the virtual world. At worst, it is a alarmist attempt to dissuade us from using the internet by telling horror stories. The author is a mental health professional specializing in OCD and compulsive disorders. By the very nature of his job, he sees lots of people with unhealthy relationships to the virtual world. He uses these extreme examples to try and prove that we are all in danger of losing our identities online. He points to changes in communication style, online dating, online gambling, online shopping habits, and our narcissistic tendencies on blogs or social networks. I concede that problematic behavior exists online. And I concede that some people take things too far. But instead of pointing to healthy online behavior and the advantages of moderation, the author seems to be saying that we are all doomed to acquire some form of mental compulsion or psychosis from using the internet.
In the end, there is no redeeming quality to this book, in audio or paper form. The narration is the worst I've ever heard out of the hundreds of books in my library, and the author is an outsider who thinks the internet can only bring bad. I just want to shake him and say "Please don't write anymore books about the internet. You don't know what you're talking about! Stick to books about OCD and Clinical Depression."
Horrible
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What I take from this book is the author looking down at Internet users, talking about virtual personalities attacking and taking over our real life personalities. Granted, some people are addicted, but the way the book is written, everyone with a Facebook account might as well be narcissistic, everybody who sends emails might as well be inconsiderate jerks and everybody who reads news online is isolated.
Full of outlier stories, the book speaks of addicts and socially troubled people in such ways as to make people believe that everybody online has psychological problems. Save your credit.
Fear Mongering Book
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