Elias Aboujaoude (b. 1971) published Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality in 2011, when blogging still mattered, Twitter still imposed a 140-character limit, and the psychological consequences of living online were new enough to seem strange. The architecture of online life, he argued, encourages a distinctive e-personality: more assertive, less restrained, more impulsive, more certain of what it knows. The danger he emphasized was permeability. Habits learned online migrate into the rest of the personality.
He was right about several of the routes. He worried that blogging frees a writer from the patient construction of an argument, and that Twitter compresses serious matters into a form hostile to sophisticated exchange. He tied impulsivity to a decline in what he called reflection, meaning the collection and evaluation of information before reaching a conclusion.
The model has a gap. If the border between the online and offline self is porous, traffic should run in both directions. Habits acquired through professional scholarship may migrate down into the e-personality while impulsivity, certainty and aggression migrate up out of it.
A personal note. After Trump returned to politics in 2023, I can’t read the blog anymore. The unhinged hatred for one side of the political spectrum (Trump and his supporters) is not my cup of tea. I don’t see any value in the , and has been doing it for years." (Marc B. Shapiro)
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)