Narcissism and Social Media

Google+ isn't big enough to make the graph

As someone about to finish his third decade of life, I have been known to partake in the modern equivalents of telling kids to get off my lawn: complaining that everyone is on their cell phones too much, touting the purity and quality of music played on traditional physical instruments (with strings and everything!), saying that the kids of the next generation are lazier than mine, and so on; roughly the same stuff people have been saying for years, just with different twists (these kids and their labor laws!). However, I think the one new wrinkle for this time in history is social media, and I'm getting to hate it more and more. I will try to channel my inner Andy Rooney (RIP) to explain.

Before the internet, there wasn't a communication medium anywhere close to having the immediacy and ease of transmission necessary for a proper social network. Whether it was newspapers, radio, network news, or cable news, unless you were important/rich enough to have someone in your pocket, there was a gauntlet of reporters, editors, and production managers to wade through if you wanted your opinions spread to the masses. While this did cut down on the amount of individual expression available to citizens, it also led the everyday person to conclude that while their opinions might be well-informed and the happenings of their life pleasant enough, nobody outside of their immediate sphere of influence really cared.

In the early years of internet communication, there were technological limitations which still kept people with normal amounts of influence in check: email lists were managed, forums were moderated, and chat rooms/instant messaging were normally only between a few people, so while inane or inconsequential communication became more normal in some realms, the audience stayed relatively small. There were also physical barriers: since all of this required a computer, and most computers were desktops, the amount of time people could commit to this practice was usually fairly small, with only the palest and most antisocial normally staying online for the majority of their waking hours.

Then a horrible convergence happened: three major factors came together to give us the modern social media landscape.

1. A generation of self-important children who were raised on participation trophies, nearly unconditional approval, and shelter from any real problems entered the much-hallowed 18-25 year old marketing demographic.
2. Mobile phone technology advanced to the point that it was normal to have a phone which could access the internet and run custom applications.
3. Web-based services appeared which gave users increasing freedom to express themselves to both an established and wide audience while the developers utilized the activity to sell advertising space, giving them incentive to encourage high user content creation volume regardless of quality.

When these combined, they created a situation where anyone with a few bucks to put down on an entry-level smartphone had the ability to post their stream of consciousness to the entire internet, the biggest audience known to mankind. Within a few minutes, a tech-savvy person can get accounts on Facebook, Twitter, InstaGram, YouTube, MySpace, Foursquare, Pinterest, and a dozen other services, allowing them to publish text, pictures, and videos to a worldwide arena as soon as any random thought crosses their mind.

Giving this ability to this generation is like giving the child of two alcoholics an open bar: most have been told since birth that they're special little snowflakes and everything they do is great, and now they have basically been given an unlimited opportunity to share their perception of self with (literally) the world. The fallout can be seen on any of the mentioned services, but in my experience, Facebook has to be the most prolific: some people checking in at literally every place they go, some posting dozens of status updates a day, some putting up pictures of their kids or dogs on a daily basis, all shared with the spirit and detail of an exuberant six year old telling a visiting relative about her day.

However, the base fact that they're posting this is only part of the story; another part is that they know that everything they post is either being broadcast to everyone they know or being made available to anyone on the internet. For the former, they know that every piece of content they post is going to cause a notification to be fired off to every friend/follower/acolyte of theirs, causing those users to check their phone or go to the service on their computer. For the latter, their post is going out to represent them to the billions of other users around the world. 

With this weight of inconvenience and representation, one would think people would put real thought into their content, churning out meaningful insights into challenges they're facing, essays on their personal goals and aspirations, or pictures which share something personal and real with the world. In fact, some do just that and better: political/social movements have been sparked by social media, as well as the careers of many artists. However, the majority of what we get is comments about how much users need coffee, how much it sucks to grow up, something "funny" their kid said, and notifications regarding which shoes they will be wearing today. If you upgrade to pictures, you get the same sunset/sunrise/landscape/closeup shot 15,000 other people took that day and put through the same ~20 filters before they uploaded it. When we go to moving pictures, we get eight videos of the same kid laughing in the same way or one video of a situation that would be funny if you had been there.

At first glance, this makes no sense: a network this powerful being used for the equivalent of chatter? But when one realizes that this power was given to this generation, it makes perfect sense. How many parties have you been to where you met twenty-somethings who droned on about how great they are, how the world doesn't appreciate their uniqueness, or how hard they think they have it? These social portals are simply giant parties where people can congregate, and because of the timing, many of them are populated by annoying twenty-somethings talking about the same shallow crap their real-life friends got sick of hearing years ago.
 
The difference between these portals and their friends is that the portals will always listen; friends sigh, roll their eyes, or stop returning calls if you constantly say stupid or inane things, but social networks beg for that next post/text/tweet/video/picture because that's their lifeblood. No matter how bad the content, these networks will post it in a nicely-formatted box along with your name and picture, showing everyone how great you are. The voices of every overpraising parent and enabling authority figure echo in the user's head, telling them what a good job they've done and how much everyone will like what they've posted. The vast majority of content is mediocre and homogenous, overwhelmingly the minutia of people's lives, put out there with the expectation that someone (maybe everyone) will care. I can find no better definition of narcissism than this. 

I do not believe these portals create narcissism; they simply exploit the existing nature of their users. It just seems many of these current users cannot resist the lure of sharing even intimate details with others, hoping that the reaction will confirm their suspicion that everyone is interested in what they have to say. When combined with the lack of any real moderation or meaningful user rating, a sea of banal content seems almost inevitable.

Regardless of the reason for the content, I have no interest in being notified every time someone visits the gym or posts another picture of their puppy. I have made a true effort to become part of the social media revolution, but have been rebuffed at nearly every turn by having to sift through a mountain of sand for every little diamond of content I care about. I wish the next generation luck in overcoming my generation's mistakes; aided by the lack of novelty, maybe theirs will be a more meaningful social media experience. To today's users, know that I do appreciate the irony of this article (a random person posting a public article railing against others submitting content via similar means), and I only hope it will encourage you to put real effort and time into the content you produce; though it might not seem so, I put a fair amount of effort into this. I hope you think about this article before you submit your next status update saying how much you like Frappuccinos and instead put the effort into making something which in turn makes me rethink something I do.