A new book by a Stanford psychiatrist provides a sober warning about how our use of the internet is making us more angry, selfish, and impatient. In his book Virtually You, Dr. Elias Aboujaoude argues that the time we spend on the internet doesn't just cause us to have online alter egos. It also changes our character—who we are and how we relate to others.

His book refers to "the psychological costs that we're paying for [our] collective love affair … with technology." Normally, we mature and then continue to grow by learning to delay gratification, live within a moral framework, and respect other people. Maturity also involves learning to control our aggressive impulses. Dr. Aboujaoude contends that this maturity is governed by our "instinct-policing superego." But in the "Wild West" of the internet, the restraint and maturity of our superego "has gone AWOL." The anonymous, narcissistic culture of the new social media produces what he calls "ordinary everyday viciousness."

We like to tell ourselves that we can move nimbly from the impersonal, mean-spirited internet world back to our "real-world" relationships. However, according to Aboujaoude, it isn't easy to compartmentalize the two worlds. He argues,

I see my book as my attempt at dissecting this thing called an e-personality—the changes that happen in our personalities when we go online, the new traits that we take on. What I see, more and more, we are starting to resemble our avatars [online personas] …. Society at large is becoming a more angry, uncivil place …. We should ask ourselves if one reason we've become so uncivil is because of what we do online and how we act on our blogs and in our chat rooms."