{"id":41,"date":"2011-05-14T21:29:26","date_gmt":"2011-05-15T01:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=41"},"modified":"2011-05-14T21:29:26","modified_gmt":"2011-05-15T01:29:26","slug":"facebook-and-narcissism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/05\/facebook-and-narcissism.html","title":{"rendered":"Facebook and Narcissism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For quite a while, I contemplated opening an account with facebook.\u00a0 A few months ago, I set aside what reservations I entertained and decided to go for it.<\/p>\n<p>Admittedly, neither the desire to \u201creconnect\u201d with old acquaintances nor any other such sympathetic desire figured at all in helping me arrive at my decision.\u00a0 Rather, I had just launched a blog and was hopeful that through facebook I could increase traffic to it.\u00a0 But lest my motives come under fire, let us be honest with ourselves: there isn\u2019t <em>one of us <\/em>who participates in facebook <em>merely <\/em>for the sake of reestablishing lost relationships.\u00a0 For that matter, very few of its users care a lick about restoring old relationships at all.<\/p>\n<p>Unquestionably, there is a complex of motives that drive facebook users.\u00a0 Yet from what I have been able to gather in the short amount of time that I have counted myself among their number, the desire to be acknowledged, to be heard, is most fundamental.<\/p>\n<p>Now, not only is this by itself not a vice, it is not infrequently the spring of virtue.\u00a0 But lest this all too understandable, even justifiable, longing to be heard be conscripted into the service of an insatiable ego, lest it be consumed by an inflated sense of self-importance, we should attend to it with all of the care that we would show an infant, for this aching for affirmation is on perpetually perilous ground.<\/p>\n<p>Regrettably, it is my considered judgment that we have been not just careless, but reckless, as far as our treatment of this desire is concerned.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Good manners demand that upon being granted the hearing from others that one seeks, one repay this good turn with something worthwhile saying.\u00a0 What constitutes \u201cworthwhile\u201d utterance is, of course, going to vary with context; but however it is determined, worthwhile utterance is the coin we pay for the hearing we\u2019ve achieved.<\/p>\n<p>Yet the problem with facebook, though, is that this hearing is no achievement at all; nor is it viewed as such by those who obtain it.\u00a0 There are facebook account holders with hundreds and, in some instances, <em>thousands<\/em> of \u201cfriends.\u201d\u00a0 At least as obvious as the fact that the vast majority of such \u201cfriends\u201d are not true <em>friends<\/em> at all is the fact they aren\u2019t even genuinely known: most of these \u201cfriends\u201d never communicate with one another at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>We are all impressed with the fact that the creators of facebook were only college-aged when they gave birth to their brain-child.\u00a0 But I now wonder whether their invention of facebook occurred, not <em>in spite of<\/em> their youth, but <em>because of it<\/em>.\u00a0 After all, outside of high school kids themselves, who better than kids barely out of high school have such a keen awareness of the intensity of the desire for popularity?\u00a0 In other words, the phenomenon of \u201cfriending\u201d was born, not from any sort of philosophical reflection on the longing to abate one\u2019s loneliness that dwells within the breast of every human being, but of the facebook creators\u2019 intimate knowledge of the pride of place that their peers gave to being popular.\u00a0 Their genius, however, was to recognize, or to assume, that regardless of how old people get, this adolescent impulse to achieve popularity never altogether leaves us.<\/p>\n<p>Granted, it can be used for multiple purposes, some of which are innocuous, if not valuable in their own right; but the \u201cfriends\u201d option intrinsic to facebook and the unmanageably large lists of names that it is utilized to accumulate render it exceedingly difficult to circumvent the conclusion that if not for the union of an inordinate love for popularity and a hyper-inflated sense of self-importance, facebook never would have seen the light of day.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Like the \u201creality television\u201d that is its counterpart and, for all of that, countless other features of our generation that promise to reserve for it an unprecedented place in the annals of narcissism, facebook boils down to a celebration of <em>me.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For quite a while, I contemplated opening an account with facebook.\u00a0 A few months ago, I set aside what reservations I entertained and decided to go for it. Admittedly, neither the desire to \u201creconnect\u201d with old acquaintances nor any other such sympathetic desire figured at all in helping me arrive at my decision.\u00a0 Rather, I&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Facebook and Narcissism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, nofollow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Facebook and Narcissism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For quite a while, I contemplated opening an account with facebook.\u00a0 A few months ago, I set aside what reservations I entertained and decided to go for it. 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