Is the Web Driving Us Mad?

[islander]

Is the Web Driving Us Mad?

Jul 9, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressedâ€"and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness, Tony Dokoupil reports.



Before he launched the most viral video in Internet history, Jason Russell was a half-hearted Web presence. His YouTube account was dead, and his Facebook and Twitter pages were a trickle of kid pictures and home-garden updates. The Web wasn’t made “to keep track of how much people like us,” he thought, and when his own tech habits made him feel like “a genius, an addict, or a megalomaniac,” he unplugged for days, believing, as the humorist Andy Borowitz put it in a tweet that Russell tagged as a favorite, “it’s important to turn off our computers and do things in the real world.”

more at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/07/08/is-the-internet-making-us-crazy-what-the-new-research-says.html

[islander]

Could the Internet Bring on a Zombie Apocalypse?

Jun 11, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

Could the Internet bring on a face-eating epidemic?


Into the digital deep: from left, mass murderer Breivik, organ-eater Alexander Kinyua, and killer-cannibal Magnotta.
(From left: Jon-Are Berg-Jacobsen / AFP-Getty Images; AFP-GettyImages-Newscom; Hartford County Sheriff's Office-AP)

By some measures, the world has never seemed more civilized. Murders, rapes, and even barroom brawls are down. Then came springtime in America, and with it kitten-killing, brain-eating, entrails-throwing, blood-spitting, naked al fresco face-devouring crimes that made Memorial Day feel like end times. After this “zombie apocalypse,” as it was quickly dubbed, the federal government moved to restore order, noting no outbreak of a virus with “zombielike symptoms” and banning “bath salts,” an amphetamine-like drug cocktail that may have played a role in some of the crimes. But the question remains: what’s with all the craziness?

more at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/06/10/could-the-internet-bring-on-a-zombie-apocalypse.html