Digital Narcissism

During the past few months, while walking on the sidewalk, numerous people bumped into me while staring down at their "smartphones". I asked a few what they were doing and not paying attention to where they were going; and they said they were "tweeting" or "texting".
So I decide to dig a bit deeper into this "digital narcissistic" tendency, and what I discovered was amazing, so I decided to share what I found.

"Digital Narcissism is a term that some use to describe the self-indulgent practices that typify all-too-much user behavior on blogs and social networking sites. People often use these mediums as tools to tune out much of the external world, while reinforcing and further rationalizing overblown esteem for their own mundane opinions, tastes and lifestyle choices"

Additionally, and to the point of this post, the digital documentation of ourselves also means that we exist. There is a common adage that if something is not on Google, it does not exist. As the world is increasingly digital, this becomes increasingly true. Especially for individuals. One adolescent told her mother, “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.”

The Internet isn’t killing anything. It’s tools, and it’s controlled by people. We are killing our culture through our miss-use of the Internet. . It’s not that I think services like blogs or twitter in themselves have a tendency to make people more self-conscious, but that more often than naught, people use the services for promotional purposes, and in the process, a lot of the personal glitter that made the early days of web-self-publishing so innovative and interesting are losing the sparkle.

Social networks aren’t doing their job. I suppose it’s because the “social” in “social network” has multiple meanings. Although people are socializing on a certain level, I find that more and more people are just using the network as a platform to boost their ego and promote themselves. This kind of digital narcissism greatly affects the kind of content they post their sites, since they are hugely interested in how others perceive them.
We are increasingly afraid of being nothing or unimportant so we develop narcissistic impulses to become real. The explosion of new ways to document ourselves online allows new outlets for importance, existence and perhaps even immortality that living only in the material world does not permit. The simple logic is that increased digital documentation of ourselves means increased digital existence. More than just social networking sites, we document ourselves on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and even increasingly with services that track, geographically, where one is at all times, often via one’s smart phone.

Take a look at this


What do you think, is it ?  "Digital narcissism" or "a new kind of shared national experience?

Walk Good