Our own John Grohol has an interesting article up on PsychCentral about teens, sex, technology, and the online disinhibition effect (comments are also open on Well). For us: Does online disinhibition play a role in everyone’s use of online health resources?
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Man, I had a wicked fine comment puffed up in here. Blockquotes, bullet stuff, you name it. The browser burped, and poof it’s gone: like sneezing into a Buddhist sand sculpture.
Short version:
– Man, PsychCentral people talk crazy. Solipsistic introjection?? Wow.
– In 2006, Dan Henninger wrote an opinion piece in the WSJ about disinhibition, mentioning that term and many others in the new lingo of online disinhibition. He started by mentioning Kevin, the Oklahoma cannibal who blogged about his compulsions for years, then says “I don’t think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don’t have to. They’ve got the Web. Now they can share.”
But see, there’s a flip side to crazy. Chapter 6 of the EP white paper talks about how some patients, enabled by the Internet to be inconspicuous, are willing to seek treatment for things, when they might have otherwise been inhibited.
One patient empowerment angle is, what becomes possible in seeking medical information when you don’t have to worry who’s looking?