Most readers already realize that online personas are often different from those in real life, but Aboujaoude offers a...
A psychiatrist who specializes in obsessive-compulsive disorders argues persuasively that the Internet can be hazardous to our mental health.
Aboujaoude (Psychiatry and Behavioral Science/Stanford Univ.; Compulsive Acts: A Psychiatrist’s Tales of Ritual and Obsession, 2008, etc.) refers to scholarly studies, media reports and his patients’ case histories to give copious examples of people altering their moral behavior and personalities online, almost always for the worse. In the virtual world, responsible adults who would never go near so much as a slot machine start gambling away their families’ life savings in virtual casinos. Individuals with low self-esteem offline spend more of their days on virtual role-playing sites like Second Life, where they can mold themselves—and sometimes others—into their idea of perfection, leaving imperfect face-to-face relationships to deteriorate. Online, mild-mannered people lie, cheat, steal, scheme and bully. Aboujaoude argues that they degrade language and, thereby, thought, reducing social communications to crude tweets of 140 characters or fewer and letting emoticons stand for their feelings. Anyone who has any experience in online forums and enterprises will recognize the ills that the author enumerates, but is it something about the Internet that causes this bad behavior, or something in human nature? Psychiatrists are undecided about whether Internet addiction is a legitimate disorder, and Aboujaoude clearly leans toward giving it its own diagnostic status. If it is indeed a “real” disorder, psychiatry may lack the tools to treat people whose psyches are more present online than in person. The author acknowledges that the Internet has wrought plenty of good; it enabled him to research much of his book from his own computer, for example. Furthermore, it isn’t going away. But just as the Industrial Revolution forever changed the physical landscape often catastrophically, the virtual revolution seems to be altering our mental world in ways we have barely begun to understand.
Most readers already realize that online personas are often different from those in real life, but Aboujaoude offers a unique psychiatrist’s perspective and an urgent wake-up call for those still in the dark.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07064-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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