Is the web driving us mad?

Tweets, texts, emails, posts.

New research says the internet can make us lonely and depressed — 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 favourite, “it’s important to turn off our computers and do things in the real world.”