Thursday, 11 October 2018

Caught in the Web?

A report has suggested that there may be new 'medical' conditions, linked to our increasing reliance on the internet (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/09/cyberchondria-and-cyberhoarding-is-internet-fuelling-new-conditions). Cyberchondria is a term applied to behaviour, where people repeatedly explore the web and convince themselves that they have developed disease conditions that they haven't actually got (such behaviour can be a bit dicey, anyhow, because not all you read on the web is entirely accurate). Cyberhoarding can be applied to situations where the sufferer becomes incapable of deleting anything (just in case it might prove useful at a later date). These 2 conditions are, of course, just extensions of what occurred in some people in response to paper versions of information in the days before computing. Perhaps there are other, really novel conditions lurking out there?

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