Facebook and the New Narcissus Pool

I have long held the conviction that Facebook is nothing more than a generator of narcissism. It's "social networking", as it is so delightfully called. But in reality Facebook is a place of egocentricity and self-promotion. How so? Look at your status updates... if they are about you and what you are doing, then we can safely call it narcissism. Especially if it is about you majority of the time.

It isn't that astonishing that psychologists and anthropologists are studying the aspects of Facebook. Recently published in Scientific America (November 2010, article by John H. Tucker) the findings of Mehdizadeh, an undergraduate at York University of Toronto (now graduated), about narcissism and low self-esteem through studying users of Facebook. This was studied by the frequency users sign on, how long they stay logged on, the frequency of status updates and wall postings, and photo sharing. If I may use a portion of the article:

After measuring each subject using the Narcissism Personality Inventory and Rosenberg Self-Esteem  Scale, Mehdizadeh... discovered narcissists and people with lower self-esteem were more likely to spend more than an hour on Facebook and were more prone to post self-promotional photos (striking a pose or using Photoshop, for example). Narcissists were also more likely to showcase themselves through status updates (using phrases like "I'm so glamorous I bleed glitter") and wall activity (posting self-serving links like "My Celebrity Look-alikes").
Self-esteem and narcissism are often interrelated but don't always go hand in hand. Some psychologists believe that narcissists - those who have a pervasive pattern grandiosity, a need for admiration, as well as a lack of empathy - unconscious inflate their sense of self-importance as a defense against feeling inadequate. Not enough empirical research has been produced to confrim that link, although Mehdizadeh's study seems to support it. Because narcissists have less capacity to sustain intimate or long-term relationships, Mehdizadeh thinks that they would be more drawn to the online world of virtual friends and emotionally detached communication.

So right there we might have a case of Jungian symbols of transformation and the alteration of unconscious archetypal motifs into various similar patterns. For instance, the evil mother motif may crop up later in life as an irate female boss in dreams (the Hamlet Complex). So, Narcissus laying by the pool admiring the one he loves, i.e. himself, is transformed into Facebook. I guess we can change that Caravaggio painting of Narcissus updating his status about how some creepy nymph kept repeating everything he said.

Welcome to a new era where social networking doesn't connect us all as it promotes itself, but means we get to know ourselves, as the Narcissus myth implies. But I guess all we can learn about ourselves is that we are all full of ourselves. I suppose class reunions every tens years wasn't enough, and now we can have them everyday with social networking.