My Face Book: The Rise of The Narcissist

If you’re anything like me, you have a couple of social media sites open on your browser right now – we’re talking Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, all of the good stuff. We all love how this can connect us as people. We have friends in Paris and friends in Amsterdam and friends in Buenos Aires, and we’ve had some pretty deep conversations with them, which tend to go something like:

hi

hi

hru

gud u

gud lol

lol

After all, if you know what someone looks like when they’re in their bedroom before a night out, or what songs they listen to when they’re feeling down, that means that you know them, right?

Wrong, actually. If we take a look at how we interact in contemporary society, we’ll see that these tools for connecting us on a broader scale are, in fact, shutting down our interpersonal skills. You just have to ask yourself when the last time was that you rode the bus and talked to the person across the aisle instead of scrolling through Instagram, and you’ll see that we’re not becoming more social – we’re becoming a mass of egotistical loners, who feed off the appreciation of strangers who we will never meet. 

If you take a minute to look at your own Facebook habits, you might notice just how much time you spend looking at Facebook – and more often than not, it’s not in order to talk to people, or hear about people’s achievements, or anything of the sort. It’s so that we can see how people are receiving our great news, our pictures, our funny little anecdotes, because let’s face it, if we put a selfie up and it doesn’t get at least five likes in ten minutes, then what’s the point of having it up there at all? 

Studies have shown that people with more Facebook friends are deemed more narcissistic, and are more likely to exploit those around them in order to gain praise. They are also most likely to accept friend requests from strangers so that they can receive some form of social support, but are far less likely to extend social support to others. Think about whether or not you do this, and if you do, don’t be too down on yourself: you might be your average narcissistic Facebooker, as the majority of participants in this experiment showed these signs too.   

While Facebook, along with its brother and sister networking sites, undoubtedly has its positives, it’s important to realise exactly how we’re behaving because of it. It’s fine to upload selfies and statuses and tweet to your heart’s content, but we all need some balance in our lives. If you feel like you are potentially becoming an all-about-me Facebooker, then perhaps it’s time to spring clean your friend list – after all, do you really need to see every update from that guy that you saw across the room at that party in 2009?