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submission
Luyseyal writes:
John Moe of Marketplace Tech Report interviews (listen to the audio) Dr. Elias Aboujaoude regarding his book, Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality. "[He] says we all carve out what he calls "e-personalities" and they're a lot more likely to be jerks than our personalities who live in the real world.
That, he says, can cause a lot of problems. He sees the e-personality escaping from its cage and creeping into more parts of day-to-day society. He sees the behavior that happened at health care debates last year as being very much informed by the inflammatory rhetoric associated with online forums. And while he won't say that online culture led to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, he thinks that the climate in which the shooting took place could be an indirect effect of the Internet. "It was a YouTube video played out in real life."