Let's BlogOff

Editor’s note: Please keep in mind that the next Blog Off will take place on Tuesday the 21st of September. Please hold off on making your Blog Off posts go live until some time after midnight on the 21st. It’s on the day of the blog off itself that we’ll be tweeting everybody’s posts and cross-promoting all of the participating blogs. Remember, anticipation is half the fun!

Last month, a Toronto undergraduate psychology student published the results of her study of Facebook users in an obscure academic journal, Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. Psych major Soraya Mehdizadeh studied the online habits of 100 Facebook users who ranged in age from 18 to 25 and her paper, Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook, found that

… analyses revealed that individuals higher in narcissism and lower in self-esteem were related to greater online activity as well as some self-promotional content.

Despite the insignificant and non-representative sample of her study, there are after all 500 million Facebook users worldwide, media outlets and talking heads pounced on her findings and trumpeted them as the revelation of a new cosmic truth.

The social networking site is a haven for narcissistic people because they can establish a large number of hollow ‘friendships’ without having to establish a real relationship, a study found.

Or so said the British newspaper, The Telegraph. The Daily Mail took the Telegraph’s opinion and ran with it:

Using Facebook is the online equivalent of staring at yourself in the mirror, according to a study.
Those who spent more time updating their profile on the social networking site were more likely to be narcissists, said researchers.

Facebook provides an ideal setting for narcissists to monitor their appearance and how many ‘friends’ they have, the study said, as it allows them to thrive on ‘shallow’ relationships while avoiding genuine warmth and empathy.

On the North American side of the Atlantic, CBS News lead with the following:

How many times have you logged onto Facebook only to find that (fill in the name here) has updated their page for the upteenth time with yet another entirely forgettable, wonder of me moment?

It would be easy to assume from the anecdotal evidence that a legion of insufferable narcissists has found the perfect sounding board. But maybe it’s not just your impression.

In the study author’s home town, the Toronto Star opined:

Compelled to tell your 500 Facebook chums every time you can’t find your sunglasses? Want the world to know you look like Robert Pattison? Post new Photoshopped pictures every day?

You, my friend, are narcissistic and insecure.

If you listen to the chorus of talking heads, online activity is ruining human interaction and social sites are the province of the self-aggrandizing and the desperate. For the last month, that study’s statistically meaningless findings have been torqued and spun in a mass media frenzy of hand wringing and sweeping generalization. News outlets from Prague to Peoria climbed on board and at this stage of the game, narcissism and Facebook have become more or less synonymous.

We thought this study and the pundits’ free-for-all that followed was a prime topic for a blog off. After all, everybody else seems to have weighed in so why not the rest of us? Does social media involvement kill human interaction? Are social sites like Facebook and Twitter drawing people closer together or are they further isolating everybody? To put it bluntly, is the world a better place with Facebook in it?

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