Fellow introvert Joanne McNeil on Jonathan Rauch's classic article on introverts and what introversion might mean on the internet.
Social media drains me like a large party might. I just deactivated Facebook. And I don't @ much on Twitter. Too often it feels like the "fog of [an extrovert's] 98-percent-content-free talk," as Rauch put it.
Seth Stevenson describes an attempt to break out of his introverted shell by taking Paxil. Did it work? Only when he'd had a few drinks...oh and he basically lost the ability to feel emotions the rest of the time. "The fact that I considered a wholesale career change under the drug's effects, and couldn't complete any work, is alarming. "
Three years ago, Jonathan Rauch wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called Caring for Your Introvert, one of my favorite pieces of magazine writing ever. He recently did an interview about the piece, which is the most popular article ever posted to the Atlantic's Web site.