Week 2 - We used to think shyness was refined. That was before social media

This article is about how social media has changed the way people are, in terms of being shy. 
In Morans book, he described shyness as “a low-intensity, mundane, chronic, nebulous and hard-to-define condition” Throughout his book, he gives examples of people overcoming the feeling of being shy, due to social media.

For example, Alan Bennett, a shy man whose working-class parents thought of reticence as a mark of sensitivity and refinement, once wrote that he had “clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue, and not, as I came too late to see, a bore”. 

Another example is, The novelist Elizabeth Taylor, whose shyness intensified after a firework accident left scars on her neck, exchanged letters for more than 25 years with the writer Robert Liddell who lived faraway in Athens.“Taylor used letter-writing to cathartically dissect her social embarrassments,” Moran writes, but it may also be true that sending letters to people who knew you only from words on paper allowed the writer to confect an epistolary personality, to exaggerate, distort or plain invent herself and the life around her. Taylor wrote a story of what happens when an expatriate novelist returns to England to discover that the version of village life given by his dedicated correspondent, a shy, single woman, is let down by reality. 







He later goes on to talk about how there's evidence on the Internet that supports the statement of social media being able to help people get over shyness. 
"The evidence is there on the web – in Facebook, Twitter, and the comment threads that have liberated shy people from their real identities and face-to-face contact on an unprecedented scale, and which use the written word rather than speech as their medium." 

In my opinion, I agree with this statement, as I believe it's easier for people to voice their opinions and talk about their feelings behind a screen, rather than doing it in person.