baithak: Baithak World May 16: On Shyness, eBay vs. Craiglist, Headl;ines, Cartoons, RealNews

‘In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill.’ So writes the Chicago-based research professor, Christopher Lane, in his fascinating new book Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness. ‘Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’, Lane continues. Lane has taken shyness as a test case to show how society is being overdiagnosed and overmedicated. He has charted - in intricate detail - the route by which the psychiatric profession came to give credence to the labelling of everyday emotions as ‘disorders’, a situation that has resulted in more and more people being deemed to be mentally ill. Humanity, thou art sick

In 1995, Craig Newmark started Craigslist.org, the popular classified-advertising Web site, as a hobby. Newmark declined to charge money for the service, hewing instead to a philosophy of "giving each other a break." The site followed a low-growth, community-focused model that encouraged posters to buy and sell wares and to publicize events in their neighborhood.
That same year, Pierre Omidyar, whose core values were "People are basically good, everyone has something to contribute, and an open environment brings out the best in people," created the online auction site that became eBay, also as a hobby. With users buying products from all over the world, eBay became a public company within three years. Omidyar is now among the richest people in the world. The fast-growing eBay now has more than 14,000 employees and owns Paypal and Skype. eBay v. Craigslist

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