narcissism

How is the online age making us more narcissistic (self-obsessed)?

As noted elsewhere, we live in a very narcissistic (self-centred) age where advertisers clamour for our attention. In many media industries in the online age, the only possible way to survive is by courting the attentions of the advertisers. For example, the print industry may well decide not to get most of their money from charging readers for copies and instead focus on making use of internet advertising and recommendation engines ('smart searches that find products for you based on your internet profile).

We are 'performance artists'. Our identity is the source of constant fascination from media producers who seek to find out what we want and will buy or 'buy into'.

As our world is so image-conscious, many of us are now automatically aware of how to react to a video camera without learning 'video presentation skills'. This has the negative effect of making us 'hyper-aware' so that we will often behave as we are expected to as opposed to how we naturally feel. Therefore, a media event will be accompanied by the best reaction we can think of that accompanies our made-up identity.