The Recession's "Web Of Fear"

Having read a perhaps apocryphal story about a fired executive begging on Madison Ave. to feed her four children, Lucy Kellaway wonders if the world wide web has ensnared us all:

The Internet has created a global psyche. The web has mentally joined us at the hip, so we can no longer put our heads in the sand. If that sounds painfully contorted, it is because it is. Just as no country can decouple itself from the ailing global economy, none of us as individuals can decouple ourselves from the ailing global psyche.

Through blogs, websites and e-mails the world’s economic ills are fed to us on a drip all day long. It is not just that we hear about bad things faster, we hear about more of them and in a more immediate way. My worries become yours, and yours become mine. On the Internet, a trouble shared online is not a trouble halved. It is a trouble needlessly multiplied all over the world.