'When well-meaning crusaders see hysterical syndromes in the context of social crises and then publicize their views through modern communications networks,' writes Showalter, 'these misconceptions can give rise to epidemics and witch hunts.' But often, she argues, these symptoms appear to be generated by hysteria, not reality.

Some, she writes, connect strongly with modern social movements to produce real and severe psychological epidemics. She doesn't allege that all these problems and disorders are faked or imagined. Showalter focuses on alien abductions, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, multiple personality disorder, recovered memories, and satanic ritual abuse. Hystories challenges the thoughtless way media absorb and transmit misleading, unsubstantiated, often panic-inspiring, stories about psychosomatic illnesses and paranoid plots. The notion of pornography as dominant in the digital world, and as spreading rampantly via the Net, is a textbook example of how a legitimate concern becomes a hysterical one, repeated so inaccurately, pervasively, and intensely that it spreads like some social microbe and becomes a commonly assumed reality. This syndrome is familiar to Internet users who've watched, bewildered, as Net culture has become the object of such hysteria, as almost every imaginable kind of plague and perversion - pedophilia, illiteracy, addiction, social isolation, and ignorance - has been attributed to a largely benign new world.

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