Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality

　　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. Aboujaoude dubs this new self our e-personality and argues that its traits are too potent to be confined online. Offline, too, we’re becoming impatient, unfocused, and urge-driven. Virtually You draws 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 demonstrates how real life is being reconfigured in the image of a chat room, and how our identity increasingly resembles that of our avatar.

作者簡介

　　Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist, earned an MD from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Author website: www.eliasaboujaoude.com Author blog: www.psychologytoday.com/blog/compulsive-acts