Facebook narcissists

By Joel Achenbach, Washington Post

…. Let’s look at These Kids Today: They have grown up in the age of the digital camera, the computer, and Facebook. These are fabulous inventions. But they’re also narcissism-enhancers. In the era of film, you didn’t waste pictures. Each image counted. You carefully staged the photo, got the light just right, waiting for the precise moment, and then executed the shot. Now a typical teenager will take 20 photos in the time it took me to type this paragraph.Of those, 18 will be taken with the camera pointed back at the teenager’s face. Six images will be discarded, and the remainder will be loaded onto the computer and eventually posted on Facebook. Social media enable kids to display themselves as no generation of kids has ever before been displayed. Parents have fretted about such exposure and the lack of privacy, so I’m not saying anything new here, but I do wonder if the technology, by allowing kids to curate their image, inevitably makes them all more self-conscious, self-focused, self-promotional. Now excuse me while I go change my Facebook profile picture.