Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality

297 Pages·2011·1.37 MB·English

by  Elias Aboujaoude

_VIRTUALLY YOU
ALSO BY ELIAS ABOUJAOUDE, MD

Compulsive Acts: A Psychiatrist’s Tales of Ritual and Obsession
_VIRTUALLY YOU
The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
_Elias Aboujaoude, MD

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York • London
Copyright © 2011 by Elias Aboujaoude, MD
All rights reserved
Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all
individuals whose stories appear in this book.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aboujaoude, Elias, 1971–
Virtually you: the dangerous powers of the e-personality / Elias Aboujaoude.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07064-4
1. Internet addiction. 2. Internet—Psychological aspects.
3. Internet—Social aspects. 4. Personality disorders. I. Title.
RC569.5.I54A26 2011
616.85'84—dc22
2010043483

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
TO MY MOTHER
_CONTENTS

PREFACE

1: E-Personality

2: Delusions of Grandeur

3: Narcissism

4: Ordinary Everyday Viciousness

5: Impulsivity

6: Infantile Regression and the Tyranny of the Emoticon

7: Love and Sex Recalibrated

8: The Illusion of Knowledge

9: Internet Addiction

10: The End of Privacy

11: Marking Time, Making Memories

12: Virtualism, or the Art of Being More Real than Real

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

APPENDIX: YOUNG’S INTERNET ADDICTION TEST

NOTES
_PREFACE

MY PATIENTS, many of whom have obsessive compulsive disorder and as a
result are highly superstitious, would probably caution me against starting a
book on the Internet with a reference to online death and virtual estate planning.
But as I was pondering how to introduce a book on this Internet life, an article
that suggested I start preparing for my online afterlife arrived in my in-box. The
news story introduced me to two Web sites that apparently any responsible
netizen should bookmark: MyLasteMail.com, where I can leave special
messages for loved ones to receive after I die—an online legacy “they can
treasure forever,” according to the site; and MyWebWill.com, which offers to
carry out my last digital wishes, such as forwarding my passwords to designated
relatives, deactivating my accounts, making one final Facebook status update
and sending one last tweet on my behalf, and even ensuring that my World of
Warcraft character finds a new stable home. Metaphysics, rest assured, is for the
most part beyond the scope of this book, especially to the extent that the afterlife
the article was concerned about is that of our avatar—an entity that, as we will
see, differs in important ways from who the dying person really is. Still, it may
be appropriate to bring up MyLasteMail and MyWebWill before Amazon or
YouTube, because they suggest how highly evolved and “complete” our Web
experience has become. This evolution, to the point where we are now born
online as someone rather different, live abundantly there, then die and have a
legacy to worry about, is, I will argue, sometimes happening at the expense of
our offline life and evolution, and our overall psychological equilibrium. And
this is very much the subject of the book.
Although I had never contemplated the digital hereafter, I have, for a long
time, wondered about what it means to go online. As a Stanford medical student
during the dot-com years, I was keenly aware of our campus’s role as technology
incubator for nearby Silicon Valley, and often marveled at the Internet’s power to