Letters

Short videos of the tic-tic variety have become popular though much maligned. They have been said to   shorten attention span and create further degradation of general thinking. This sort of pop humor, a mixture of vulgarity, stupidity and stereotypes actually has a long history. George Orwell described the artist Donald McGill who produced postcards in the twenties, usually having a salacious, double entendre style of humor, with oversexualized women, acting out and feckless males, and much innuendo. Harmless enough in small doses, they do provide some low-brow entertainment, in the same way as modern tic toc videos. They were the humor of the working class then, and probably now as well trying to show as much intellectual noblesse oblige as possible.

Over the course of my intensive study of psychology for over 50 years, I have encountered a multitude of terms that have emerged and faded away. Descriptors of personality functioning and psychological traits are vast and diverse. They include dimensions such as introversion and extroversion, neuroticism, resilience, dependency, inhibition, acting out tendencies, addiction proneness, lability, self-centeredness, narcissism, asceticism, imperturbability, intellectual level, sociability, cognitive flexibility, perceptual accuracy, and countless others—perhaps even a few hundred more. In addition to these existing terms, another descriptor can be considered: the degree of immersion in the cyber world, which I propose to call "cyberism." Some individuals find themselves deeply immersed in the cyber world, while others do not. Although the cyber world bears similarities to the real world, it is not an exact replica. For those whose reality predominantly resides within the cyber wo