Tag Archives: narcissism

Philanthrophy and Playing God

I would suspect that most of us, as we age and enter the second half of our fleeting existence, dream of leaving something behind, a legacy of some sort. That something may be an invaluable collection of intangibles: thoughts, ideas and values that we pass on to our children, partners, family and friends. For others the legacy may be more physical and yet still intimate: favorite books, old toys, a battered mug, personal photos, jewelry, a treasured car. And, for others still — usually the much more wealthy among us — the legacy usually involves making a grander exit for a community or even a nation: a newly named wing of a hospital or even an entire building; a donation of art to the nation; an endowment to a favored charity or alma mater; a research chair at the local university; a bequest of land for future generations to enjoy.

During last 25-30 years we have seen the continued expansion of this ultra-wealthy class, the multi-billionaires. Despite some rather vulgar and ostentatious displays of excess, many have pledged to give most of their riches away — while still living — to worthy causes. The philanthropic who’s-who includes: Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, Zuckerberg/Chan, Paul Allen, to name but a few.

This leads to an interesting question: are our billionaire contemporaries trying to play God?

From the Independent:

Is anyone else left underwhelmed by the unbearable arrogance of Mark Zuckerberg? Not content with saving Africa through his Internet.org project to get “everyone in the continent” online, he’s now decided that his money can eradicate all disease. Not just Alzheimer’s, not just the many variations of cancer, not just HIV, not just the Zika virus, not just rare genetic abnormalities and not just the common cold: all disease, because that’s what $3bn can get you. Why did none of us think of this before?

Following the birth of their first child Max last year, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan pledged to give away 99 per cent of their wealth to philanthropic causes. Now I have to admit this is slightly more inspiring than the widespread reports Jay Z had decided to stop using the word “bitch” after the birth of his daughter Blue Ivy (a change of heart that was later denied by his publicists, FYI, so expect the B-word to continue populating Jay’s lyrics for the foreseeable future), but it’s still, at best, hopelessly naïve and incredibly American.

It’s a nice idea that if you become rich enough, you can start to play God – but there are clear limits to Zuckerberg’s apparent omnipotence. $3bn is a wonderful gift to medicine, which will undoubtedly be used for some very positive research, facilities and treatments. Zuckerberg and Chan are being wonderfully philanthropic and unselfish in their huge donation of funds. But the Facebook founder’s claim that lots of money can magically render all disease a minor, manageable inconvenience is unnecessarily grandiose. Killer disease will always exist – everybody dies of something – and sometimes accepting your limits is just as important as shooting for the moon.

Read the entire article here.

Bad Art of the Deal

Urinal-art

It goes without question that a billionaire narcissist — who just happens to be running for president of the United States in 2016 — will have any number of images of himself (there aren’t many billionaire narcissistic women). But for every photograph or artwork that celebrates and reinforces the narcissist — no doubt commissioned for or by the narcissist and hanging in a prominent spot in one each of his homes — there will be another work that seeks to counter the narcissist’s carefully curated image. This is what good political art does. It counters and questions, and it supplements our open political discourse so that we may see and weigh other perspectives.

Oh, and it’s sharply and darkly funny too!

Image: Donald Trump meets Rolling Stones-inspired urinals at Belushi’s sports bar in Paris. Artists: William Duke and Brandon Griffin have added. Photograph: Meike van Schijndel.

The Global Peril of Narcissism

Google-search-demagogue

I suspect that prior to our gluttonous always-on, social media age narcissists were very much a local phenomenon — probably much like European diseases remained mostly confined to the Old World prior to the advent of frequent shipping and air travel. Nowadays narcissistic traits such as self-absorption, image inflation and lack of empathy spread and amplify across the globe as impressionable tribes like, follow and emulate their narcissistic role models. As the virus of self-obsession spreads this puts our increasingly global village at some peril — replacing empathy with indifference and altruism with self-promotion, and leading to the inevitable rise of charismatic demagogues.

Author and psychotherapist Pat Macdonald aptly describes the rise of narcissism in her recent paper Narcissism in the Modern World. Quite paradoxically, Macdonald finds that,

“Much of our distress comes from a sense of disconnection. We have a narcissistic society where self-promotion and individuality seem to be essential, yet in our hearts that’s not what we want. We want to be part of a community, we want to be supported when we’re struggling, we want a sense of belonging. Being extraordinary is not a necessary component to being loved.”

From the Guardian:

“They unconsciously deny an unstated and intolerably poor self-image through inflation. They turn themselves into glittering figures of immense grandeur surrounded by psychologically impenetrable walls. The goal of this self-deception is to be impervious to greatly feared external criticism and to their own rolling sea of doubts.” This is how Elan Golomb describes narcissistic personality disorder in her seminal book Trapped in the Mirror. She goes on to describe the central symptom of the disorder – the narcissist’s failure to achieve intimacy with anyone – as the result of them seeing other people like items in a vending machine, using them to service their own needs, never being able to acknowledge that others might have needs of their own, still less guess what they might be. “Full-bodied narcissistic personality disorder remains a fairly unusual diagnosis,” Pat MacDonald, author of the paper Narcissism in the Modern World, tells me. “Traditionally, it is very difficult to reverse narcissistic personality disorder. It would take a long time and a lot of work.”

What we talk about when we describe an explosion of modern narcissism is not the disorder but the rise in narcissistic traits. Examples are everywhere. Donald Trump epitomises the lack of empathy, the self-regard and, critically, the radical overestimation of his own talents and likability. Katie Hopkins personifies the perverse pride the narcissist takes in not caring for others. (“No,” she wrote in the Sun about the refugee crisis. “I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”) Those are the loudest examples, blaring like sirens; there is a general hubbub of narcissism beneath, which is conveniently – for observation purposes, at least – broadcast on social media. Terrible tragedies, such as the attacks on Paris, are appropriated by people thousands of miles away and used as a backdrop to showcase their sensitivity. The death of David Bowie is mediated through its “relevance” to voluble strangers.

It has become routine for celebrities to broadcast banal information and fill Instagram with the “moments” that constitute their day, the tacit principle being that, once you are important enough, nothing is mundane. This delusion then spills out to the non-celebrity; recording mundane events becomes proof of your importance. The dramatic rise in cosmetic surgery is part of the same effect; the celebrity fixates on his or her appearance to meet the demands of fame. Then the vanity, being the only truly replicable trait, becomes the thing to emulate. Ordinary people start having treatments that only intense scrutiny would warrant – 2015 saw a 13% rise in procedures in the UK, with the rise in cosmetic dentistry particularly marked, because people don’t like their teeth in selfies. The solution – stop taking selfies – is apparently so 2014.

Read the entire story here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

Grandiose Narcissism

Google-search-GOP-debate

Oh America! You are locked in a painful and relentless electioneering cycle. Love it or hate it, the process of electing a president is a brutal and brutish amalgam of self-centeredness, untruth, circus-showmanship, flamboyance and ego. Psychologists have a label for these traits, often synthesized to their essence in political candidates and leaders. It’s called grandiose narcissism. It would seem that during the current presidential election cycle, which began several hundred years and 10 million political commercials ago, has an overstuffed share of these grandiose narcissists. This makes for tremendous entertainment. But, it’s thoroughly ghastly to think that one of these performers could be in the White House a mere six months from now.

From the NYT:

With the presidential campaign in full swing, a perennial question has resurfaced: How much weight should voters give to candidates’ personalities? The political rise of Donald J. Trump has drawn attention to one personality trait in particular: narcissism. Although narcissism does not lend itself to a precise definition, most psychologists agree that it comprises self-centeredness, boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration.

We have never met Mr. Trump, let alone examined him, so it would be inappropriate of us to offer a formal assessment of his level of narcissism. And in all fairness, today’s constant media attention makes a sizable ego a virtual job requirement for public office. Still, the Trump phenomenon raises the question of what kinds of leaders narcissists make. Fortunately, a recent body of research has suggested some answers.

In a 2013 article in Psychological Science, we and our colleagues approached this question by studying the 42 United States presidents up to and including George W. Bush. (The primary data were collected before Barack Obama’s presidency.) First we took a data set compiled by the psychologists Steven Rubenzer and Thomas Faschingbauer, who for an earlier study asked experts on each president to complete personality surveys on the subjects of their expertise. Then, using standard formulas from the research literature on personality, we produced estimates of each president’s narcissism level. Finally, we correlated these personality ratings with data from surveys of presidential performance obtained from independent panels of historians.

We found that narcissism, specifically “grandiose narcissism” — an amalgam of flamboyance, immodesty and dominance — was associated with greater overall presidential success. (This relation was small to moderate in magnitude.) The two highest scorers on grandiose narcissism were Lyndon B. Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt, the two lowest James Monroe and Millard Fillmore.

Grandiose narcissism was tied to slightly better crisis management, public persuasiveness and agenda-setting. Presidents with high levels of this trait were also more likely to assume office by winning election in a landslide (55 percent or more of the popular vote) and to initiate new legislation.

Yet we also found that grandiose narcissism was associated with certain negative outcomes, including unethical behaviors like stealing, abusing power and bending rules. High scorers on this trait were especially likely to have been the target of impeachment resolutions (John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton).

We also considered a less well-understood dimension of narcissism: “vulnerable narcissism,” a trait associated with being self-absorbed and thin-skinned (think of Richard M. Nixon, who was a high scorer on this trait). We found that vulnerable narcissism showed little relation to successful presidential leadership.

To be certain, our results were based on a small and highly select sample, and we relied on presidential experts’ judgments of personality. Still, other psychological studies of narcissism, using other data and different methods, have yielded broadly similar results.

In contrast, the psychologist W. Keith Campbell and others have found that narcissists tend to be overconfident when making decisions, to overestimate their abilities and to portray their ideas as innovative when they are not. Compared with their non-narcissistic counterparts, they are more likely to accumulate resources for themselves at others’ expense.

Read the entire story here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

Your Perfect Lifestyle Captured, Shared, Commoditized

Socality-BarbieMany millions of people post countless images on a daily basis of their perfect soft-focus and sepia-toned lives on Instagram (and other social media). These images are cataloged and captioned and shared so that many more millions may participate vicariously in these wonderfully perfect moments.

Recently a well known personality joined the Instagram picture-posting, image-sharing frenzy. Not unlike movie-stars, sports personalities and the music glitterati she’s garnered millions of followers on Instagram. She posts pictures of her latest, perfect outfits with perfect hair; she shows us perfect lattes sipped from the perfect coffee shop; she shares shares soft-focus sunsets from perfect mountaintops; images of a perfect 5-course dinner from a perfectly expensive bistro with or without that perfect bearded date; photographs of perfect vacations at the beach or from a yacht or a vintage train. She seems to have a perfect life, captured in a kaleidoscopic torrent of perfect visuals.

Her name is Barbie. Actually, her full name is Socality Barbie. She’s a parody of her human followers, and she’s well on her way to becoming the next social media sensation. Except, she’s not real, she’s a Barbie doll. But what’s really interesting about Socality Barbie is that she’s much like many of her human peers on social media — she’s a commoditized hipster.

My one complaint: she doesn’t take enough selfies. I wonder what’s next for her — perhaps an eponymous reality TV show.

From the Guardian:

Here she is on the sand, barefoot in the lapping waves, wearing cropped skinny jeans and shoulder-robing a blanket. And here she is in a cafe, the sleeves of her utility overshirt pushed up as she reaches for her flat white with its photogenic foam-art. Here she is in the mountains, wearing a beanie hat that perfectly offsets hair blow-dried into soft waves. Oh, and look, here’s a still-life shot of her weekend-away capsule wardrobe laid out on hardwood floors. She’s taking high-heeled hiking boots. But then, she is a Barbie doll.

Socality Barbie, the newest social-media sensation, is on a mission to take down Instagram from the inside. The account is the brainchild of an anonymous wedding photographer in Oregon, who dresses a Barbie doll in mini-hipster outfits and posts Instagram shots of doll-sized hikes (always sunny, lots of photogenic light shafts through the trees), coffee dates (whitewashed wooden tables and a calm, mindful atmosphere) and boyfriends (check shirt, facial hair).

It’s not exactly satire – I don’t think you can really satirise Instagram, that would be like satirising kittens – but Socality Barbie skewers something about how plastic Instagram has become. She is the Rosa Parks of a society oppressed by thigh gaps and tyrannised by heavily filtered brunches. She is a taking a brave stand against – OK, poking fun at – the disproportionate power and influence of Instagram, which has overtaken the Farrow & Ball paint chart as the sacred text we must live by.

Let me get one thing straight: I love Instagram. I am addicted. Sometimes I wake up in the night and, half asleep, reach for my phone and start scrolling through my feed, which at that hour is Lily-Rose Depp in novelty socks, people I vaguely know in New York taking overlit selfies in bars and insomniacs on a 3am camera-roll jag posting throwback photos with mawkish captions. And I love it. So I am absolutely not about to declare Instagram over. Anyway, that would be idiotic: in 2012, Facebook paid $1bn to buy it; it is now valued at $35bn. And in fashion, Instagram is everything. It has catwalk shows in real time, street style from all over the world, plus you get to see every time someone you know buys a new coat. What more could I possibly want?

But what Instagram isn’t any more is cutting edge. Instead of being hip, it is a world of commodified hipsterdom. All pigeon-toed loafers on pretty tiled floors and nail art on a hand holding a street-truck burger. It is a guilty pleasure, a cosy comforting world where everyone dresses really well and is also, like, super nice. It is is a bit like watching reality TV, in fact. You get to watch attractive people living their lives, at a level of apparent intimacy that makes it compelling. Theoretically, Instagram is more high-minded than reality TV, because it shows you a kaleidoscope of viewpoints from all over the world. The trouble is they all look the same.

Read the entire story here.

Images courtesy of Socality Barbie.

Selfie-Drone: It Was Only a Matter of Time

Google-search-selfie-drone

Those of you who crave a quiet, reflective escape from the incessant noise of the modern world, may soon find even fewer places for quiet respite. Make the most of your calming visit to the beach or a mountain peak or an alpine lake or an emerald forest before you are jolted back to reality by swarms of buzzing selfie-drones. It’s rather ironic to see us regress as our technology evolves. Oh, and you can even get a wearable one! Does our penchant for narcissistic absorption have no bounds? That said, there is one positive to come of this dreadful application of a useful invention — the selfie-stick may be on the way out. I will now revert to my quiet cave for the next 50 years.

From NYT:

It was a blistering hot Sunday in Provence. The painted shutters of the houses in Arles were closed. Visitors were scarce. In the Roman amphitheater, built to hold some 20,000 spectators, I sat among empty bleachers, above homes with orange tile roofs, looking past ancient arcades and terraces to the blue horizon. Was this the sort of stillness van Gogh experienced when he was in Arles on this same June day in 1888? I began to entertain the thought but was distracted by a soft whirring; a faint electric hum. Something was drawing near. I looked around and saw nothing — until it and I were eye to eye.

Or rather, eye to lens. A drone resembling one of those round Roomba robotic vacuums had levitated from the pit of the nearly 2,000-year-old arena and was hovering in the air between me and the cloudless horizon. Reflexively I turned away and tugged on the hem of my dress. Who knew where this flying Roomba was looking or what it was recording?

Unexpected moments of tranquility, like finding yourself in a near-empty Roman arena during a heat wave, are becoming more and more elusive. If someone isn’t about to inadvertently impale you with a selfie-stick, another may catch you on video with a recreational drone, like the DJI Phantom (about $500 to $1,600), which is easy to use (unless you’re inebriated, like the man who crashed a Phantom on the White House grounds in January).

Yet what travelers are seeing today — remote-controlled drones bobbing around tourist sites, near airports, in the Floridian National Golf Club in Palm City while President Obama played golf — is but the tip of the iceberg. Think remote-controlled drones and selfie-sticks are intrusive? Prepare for the selfie-drone.

This next generation of drones, which are just beginning to roll out, doesn’t require users to hold remote controllers: They are hands-free. Simply toss them in the air, and they will follow you like Tinker Bell. With names such as Lily (around $700 on pre-order) and Nixie (not yet available for pre-order), they are capable of recording breathtaking video footage and trailing adventure travelers across bridges and streams, down ski slopes and into secluded gardens.

Nixie, which you can wear on your wrist until you want to fling it off for a photo or video, has a “boomerang mode” that allows it to fly back to you as if it were a trained raptor. A promotional video for Lily shows a man with a backpack lobbing the drone like a stone over a bridge and casually walking away, only to have the thing float up and follow him. Think you can outmaneuver the contraption in white-water rapids? Lily is waterproof. I watched with awe a video of Lily being dumped into a river beside a woman in a kayak (where one assumes Lily will perish), yet within seconds emerging and rising, like Glenn Close from the bathtub in “Fatal Attraction.”

There is no denying that the latest drone technology is impressive. And the footage is striking. Adventure travelers who wish to watch themselves scale Kilimanjaro or surf in Hawaii along the North Shore of Oahu will no doubt want one. But if selfie-drones become staples of every traveler who can afford them, we stand to lose more than we stand to gain when it comes to privacy, safety and quality-of-life factors like peace and beauty.

Imagine sunsets at the lake or beach with dozens of selfie-drones cluttering the sky, each vying for that perfect shot. Picture canoodling on a seemingly remote park bench during your romantic getaway and ending up on video. The intimate walks and tête-à-têtes that call to mind Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester would hardly be the same with drones whizzing by. Think of your children building sand castles and being videotaped by passing drones. Who will be watching and recording us, and where will that information end up?

I shudder to think of 17- and 18-year-olds receiving drones for Christmas and on their winter vacations crashing the contraptions into unsuspecting sunbathers. Or themselves. Lest you think I joke, consider that in May the singer Enrique Iglesias, who is well past his teenage years, sliced his fingers while trying to snap a photo with a (remote-controlled) drone during his concert in Mexico.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

Self-Absorbed? Rejoice!

aricsnee-selfie-arm

From a culture that celebrates all things selfie comes the next logical extension. An invention that will surely delight any image-conscious narcissist.

The “selfie arm” is a wonderful tongue-firmly-in-cheek invention of artists Aric Snee and Justin Crowe. Their aim, to comment on the illusion of sociableness and connectedness. Thankfully they plan to only construct 10 of these contraptions. But, you know, somewhere and soon, a dubious entrepreneur will be hawking these for $19.95.

One can only hope that the children of Gen-Selfie will eventually rebel against their self-absored parents — until then I’m crawling back under my rock.

From Wired UK:

A selfie stick designed to look like a human arm will ensure you never look alone, but always feel alone. The accessory is designed to make it appear that a lover or friend is holding your hand while taking a photo, removing the crushing sense of narcissistic loneliness otherwise swamping your existence.

The prototype ‘selfie arm’ is the work of artists Justin Crowe and Aric Snee and isn’t intended to be taken seriously. Made of fibreglass, the selfie arm was created in protest against the “growing selfie stick phenomenon, and the constant, gnawing need for narcissistic internet validation,” according to Designboom.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Selfie arm by Aric Snee and Justin Crowe. Courtesy of Aric Snee and Justin Crowe.

Yawn. Selfies Are So, Like, Yesterday!

DOOB 3D-image

If you know a dedicated and impassioned narcissist it’s time to convince him or her to ditch the selfie. Oh, and please ensure she or he discards the selfie-stick while they’re at it. You see, the selfie — that ubiquitous expression of the me-me-generation — is now rather passé.

So, where does a self-absorbed individual turn next? Enter the 3D printed version of yourself courtesy of a German company called DOOB 3D, with its Dooblicator scanner and high-res 3D printer. Connoisseurs of self can now — for a mere $395 — replicate themselves with a 10-inch facsimile. If you’re a cheapskate, you can get a Playmobil-sized replica for $95; while a 14-inch selfie-doll will fetch you $695. Love it!

To learn more about DOOB 3D visit their website.

From Wired:

We love looking at images of ourselves. First there were Olan Mills portraits. Nowadays there are selfies and selfie-stick selfies and drone selfies.

If you’re wondering what comes next, Dusseldorf-based DOOB 3D thinks it has the answer—and contrary to what the company’s name suggests, it doesn’t involve getting high and watching Avatar.

DOOB 3D can produce a detailed, four-inch figurine of your body—yes, a 3-D selfie. Making one of these figurines requires a massive pile of hardware and software: 54 DSLRs, 54 lenses, a complex 3-D modeling pipeline, and an $80,000 full-color 3-D printer, not to mention a room-size scanning booth.

Factor that all in and the $95 asking price for a replica of yourself that’s roughly the size of most classic Star Wars action figures doesn’t seem so bad. A Barbie-esque 10-inch model goes for $395, while a 14-inch figure that’s more along the lines of an old-school G.I. Joe doll costs $695.

The company has eight 3-D scanning booths (called “Doob-licators”) scattered in strategic locations throughout the world. There’s one in Dusseldorf, one in Tokyo, one at Santa Monica Place in Los Angeles, and one in New York City’s Chelsea Market. The company also says they’re set to add more U.S. locations soon, although details aren’t public yet.

In New York, the pop-up DOOB shop in Chelsea Market was a pretty big hit. According to Michael Anderson, CEO of DOOB 3D USA, the Doob-licator saw about 500 customers over the winter holiday season. About 10 percent of the booth’s customers got their pets Doob-licated.

“At first, (people got DOOBs made) mostly on a whim,” says Anderson of the holiday-season spike. Most people just walk up and stand in line, but you can also book an appointment in advance.

“Now that awareness has been built,” Anderson says, “there has been a shift where at least two thirds of our customers have planned ahead to get a DOOB.”

Each Doob-licator is outfitted with 54 Canon EOS Rebel T5i DSLRs, arranged in nine columns of six cameras each. You can make an appointment or just wait in line: A customer steps in, strikes a pose, and the Doob-licator operator fires all the cameras at once. That creates a full-body scan in a fraction of a second. The next step involves feeding all those 18-megapixel images through the company’s proprietary software, which creates a 3-D model of the subject.

The printing process requires more patience. The company operates three high-end 3-D printing centers to support its scanning operations: One in Germany, one in Tokyo, and one in Brooklyn. They all use 3D Systems’ ProJet 660Pro, a high-resolution (600 x 540 dpi) 3-D printer that creates full-color objects on the fly. The printer uses a resin polymer material, and the full range of CMYK color is added to each powder layer as it’s printed.

With a top printing speed of 1.1 inches per hour and a process that sometimes involves thousands of layers of powder, the process takes a few hours for the smallest-size DOOB and half a day or more for the larger ones. And depending on how many DOOBs are lined up in the queue, your mini statue takes between two and eight weeks to arrive in the mail.

Once you step inside that Doob-licator, it’s like international waters: You are largely unbound by laws and restrictions. Do you want to get naked? Go right ahead. Along with your nude statue, the company will also send you a 3-D PDF and keep your data in its database in case you want additional copies made (you can request that your data be deleted if that sounds too creepy).

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of of DOOB 3D.

I Don’t Know, But I Like What I Like: The New Pluralism

choiceIn an insightful opinion piece, excerpted below, a millennial wonders if our fragmented and cluttered, information-rich society has damaged pluralism by turning action into indecision. Even aesthetic preferences come to be so laden with judgmental baggage that expressing a preference for one type of art, or car, or indeed cereal, seems to become an impossible conundrum  for many born in the mid-1980s or later. So, a choice becomes a way to alienate those not chosen — when did selecting a cereal become such an onerous exercise in political correctness and moral relativism?

From the New York Times:

Critics of the millennial generation, of which I am a member, consistently use terms like “apathetic,” “lazy” and “narcissistic” to explain our tendency to be less civically and politically engaged. But what these critics seem to be missing is that many millennials are plagued not so much by apathy as by indecision. And it’s not surprising: Pluralism has been a large influence on our upbringing. While we applaud pluralism’s benefits, widespread enthusiasm has overwhelmed desperately needed criticism of its side effects.

By “pluralism,” I mean a cultural recognition of difference: individuals of varying race, gender, religious affiliation, politics and sexual preference, all exalted as equal. In recent decades, pluralism has come to be an ethical injunction, one that calls for people to peacefully accept and embrace, not simply tolerate, differences among individuals. Distinct from the free-for-all of relativism, pluralism encourages us (in concept) to support our own convictions while also upholding an “energetic engagement with diversity, ” as Harvard’s Pluralism Project suggested in 1991. Today, paeans to pluralism continue to sound throughout the halls of American universities, private institutions, left-leaning households and influential political circles.

However, pluralism has had unforeseen consequences. The art critic Craig Owens once wrote that pluralism is not a “recognition, but a reduction of difference to absolute indifference, equivalence, interchangeability.” Some millennials who were greeted by pluralism in this battered state are still feelings its effects. Unlike those adults who encountered pluralism with their beliefs close at hand, we entered the world when truth-claims and qualitative judgments were already on trial and seemingly interchangeable. As a result, we continue to struggle when it comes to decisively avowing our most basic convictions.

Those of us born after the mid-1980s whose upbringing included a liberal arts education and the fruits of a fledgling World Wide Web have grown up (and are still growing up) with an endlessly accessible stream of texts, images and sounds from far-reaching times and places, much of which were unavailable to humans for all of history. Our most formative years include not just the birth of the Internet and the ensuing accelerated global exchange of information, but a new orthodoxy of multiculturalist ethics and “political correctness.”

These ideas were reinforced in many humanities departments in Western universities during the 1980s, where facts and claims to objectivity were eagerly jettisoned. Even “the canon” was dislodged from its historically privileged perch, and since then, many liberal-minded professors have avoided opining about “good” literature or “high art” to avoid reinstating an old hegemony. In college today, we continue to learn about the byproducts of absolute truths and intractable forms of ideology, which historically seem inextricably linked to bigotry and prejudice.

For instance, a student in one of my English classes was chastened for his preference for Shakespeare over that of the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat. The professor challenged the student to apply a more “disinterested” analysis to his reading so as to avoid entangling himself in a misinformed gesture of “postcolonial oppression.” That student stopped raising his hand in class.

I am not trying to tackle the challenge as a whole or indict contemporary pedagogies, but I have to ask: How does the ethos of pluralism inside universities impinge on each student’s ability to make qualitative judgments outside of the classroom, in spaces of work, play, politics or even love?

In 2004, the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour intimated that the skeptical attitude which rebuffs claims to absolute knowledge might have had a deleterious effect on the younger generation: “Good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on.” Latour identified a condition that resonates: Our tenuous claims to truth have not simply been learned in university classrooms or in reading theoretical texts but reinforced by the decentralized authority of the Internet. While trying to form our fundamental convictions in this dizzying digital and intellectual global landscape, some of us are finding it increasingly difficult to embrace qualitative judgments.

Matters of taste in music, art and fashion, for example, can become a source of anxiety and hesitation. While clickable ways of “liking” abound on the Internet, personalized avowals of taste often seem treacherous today. Admittedly, many millennials (and nonmillennials) might feel comfortable simply saying, “I like what I like,” but some of us find ourselves reeling in the face of choice. To affirm a preference for rap over classical music, for instance, implicates the well-meaning millennial in a web of judgments far beyond his control. For the millennial generation, as a result, confident expressions of taste have become more challenging, as aesthetic preference is subjected to relentless scrutiny.

Philosophers and social theorists have long weighed in on this issue of taste. Pierre Bourdieu claimed that an “encounter with a work of art is not ‘love at first sight’ as is generally supposed.” Rather, he thought “tastes” function as “markers of ‘class.’ ” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that aesthetic preference could be traced along socioeconomic lines and reinforce class divisions. To dislike cauliflower is one thing. But elevating the work of one writer or artist over another has become contested territory.

This assured expression of “I like what I like,” when strained through pluralist-inspired critical inquiry, deteriorates: “I like what I like” becomes “But why do I like what I like? Should I like what I like? Do I like it because someone else wants me to like it? If so, who profits and who suffers from my liking what I like?” and finally, “I am not sure I like what I like anymore.” For a number of us millennials, commitment to even seemingly simple aesthetic judgments have become shot through with indecision.

Read the entire article here.

The Decade of the Selfie

skineepix

Two recent stories are indicative of these self-obsessed times, and of course, both center around the selfie. One gives us some added insights into SkinneePix — a smartphone app that supposedly transforms you into your thinner and more attractive self. The second, shows us that perhaps, just perhaps, the selfie craze has reached its zenith — as politicians and royals and pop-stars show us what their bed-heads and double chins look like.

I’d like to hope that the trend fizzles soon, as have thousands of flash-in-the-pan trends have done before. Yet, what if this is just the beginning of an era that is unabashedly more self-centered? After all, there is a vast untapped world of selfidom out there: audio selfies of our bathroom routines; selfies that automatically rate your BMI; selfies that you can print in 3D; selfies that become your personal digital assistant; selfies that text other selfies; a selfie hall-of-fame; selfies that call your analyst based on how you look; selfies that set up appointments with your hair stylist should your hair not look like the top 10 selfies of the day; selfies from inside the body; a selfie that turns off your credit card and orders celery if you look 5 lbs overweight; selfies of selfies.

From the Guardian:

If you thought Prince Andrew or Michael Gove’s attempts at selfies were the worst thing about the craze – think again.

There is now an app which is designed specifically to make you look skinnier in your selfies. Acting as a FatBooth in reverse, SkinneePix promises to make it look like you’ve shed 5, 10 or 15 lbs with just the click of a button.

The description reads: “SkinneePix makes your photos look good and helps you feel good. It’s not complicated. No one needs to know. It’s our little secret.”

It’s already the norm to add a toasted haze to pouty selfies thanks to photo filters, and some celebs have even been accused of airbrushing their own pictures before putting them up on Instagram – so it was only a matter of time before someone came up with an app like this.

Creators Susan Green and Robin J Phillips say they came up with the app after discovering they hated all the selfies they took on holiday with friends. Green told the Huffington Post: “You’ve always heard about the camera adding 15 pounds, we just wanted to level the playing field.”

They do say don’t knock something til you’ve tried it, so I handed over 69p to iTunes in order to have a poke around the app and see what it’s really like. As it boots up the camera, it flashes up a little message which range from “Good hair day!” to “Make me look good”.

You can’t alter group pictures such as the now infamous Oscars selfie, so I snapped a quick photo at my desk.

Read more here.

From the Telegraph:

RIP The Selfie. It was fun while it lasted, really it was. What larks and indeed Likes as we watched popstrels Rihanna and Rita Ora and model Cara Delevigne record their tiny bikinis and piercings and bed-heads and, once, an endangered slow loris, for posterity.

The ironic Selfie remained fun and fresh and pout-tastic even when it was ushered into the august oak-paneled annals of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The egocentric Selfie weathered President Obama taking a deeply inappropriate quickie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral with the hottie Danish PM whose name we have all forgotten, and David Cameron.

The stealth Selfie even survived the PM being snapped barefoot and snoozing on the bed of his sister-in-law on the morning of her wedding day.

And the recent Ellen DeGeneres Oscars Selfie, with every celeb that ever there was jam-packed together (and, astonishingly, in focus) pretty much qualifies as the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts album cover de nos jours.

But then, as is the inevitable parabola of such things, this week the entire phenomenon took a nosedive and died a million pixellated deaths thanks first to Ed Milliband’s blurred, sad-sack Selfie, in which he’s barely in the frame. Bit like his political career, really.

Then came the Parthian Shot: Prince Andrew’s royal snap in which the west wing of Buck House was eclipsed by his Selfie-satisfied porky chops.

And with that, a cutting edge trend turned into the dire digital equivalent of dad-dancing.

Cause of death: Selfie-harm.

Read more here.

Image courtesy of the Guardian / Skinneepix.

Younger Narcissists Use Twitter…

…older narcissists use Facebook.

google-search-selfie

Online social media and social networks provide a wonderful petri-dish with which to study humanity. For those who are online and connected — and that is a significant proportion of the world’s population — their every move, click, purchase, post and like can be collected, aggregated, dissected and analyzed (and sold). These trails through the digital landscape provide a fertile ground for psychologists and social scientists of all types to examine our behaviors and motivations, in real-time. By their very nature online social networks offer researchers a vast goldmine of data from which to extract rich nuggets of behavioral and cultural trends — a digital trail is easy to find and impossible to erase. A perennial favorite for researchers is the area of narcissism (and we suspect it is a favorite of narcissists as well).

From the Atlantic:

It’s not hard to see why the Internet would be a good cave for a narcissist to burrow into. Generally speaking, they prefer shallow relationships (preferably one-way, with the arrow pointing toward themselves), and need outside sources to maintain their inflated but delicate egos. So, a shallow cave that you can get into, but not out of. The Internet offers both a vast potential audience, and the possibility for anonymity, and if not anonymity, then a carefully curated veneer of self that you can attach your name to.

In 1987, the psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius claimed that a person has two selves: the “now self” and the “possible self.” The Internet allows a person to become her “possible self,” or at least present a version of herself that is closer to it.

When it comes to studies of online narcissism, and there have been many, social media dominates the discussion. One 2010 study notes that the emergence of the possible self “is most pronounced in anonymous online worlds, where accountability is lacking and the ‘true’ self can come out of hiding.” But non-anonymous social networks like Facebook, which this study was analyzing, “provide an ideal environment for the expression of the ‘hoped-for possible self,’ a subgroup of the possible-self. This state emphasizes realistic socially desirable identities an individual would like to establish given the right circumstances.”

The study, which found that people higher in narcissism were more active on Facebook, points out that you tend to encounter “identity statements” on social networks more than you would in real life. When you’re introduced to someone in person, it’s unlikely that they’ll bust out with a pithy sound bite that attempts to sum up all that they are and all they hope to be, but people do that in their Twitter bio or Facebook “About Me” section all the time.

Science has linked narcissism with high levels of activity on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace (back in the day). But it’s important to narrow in farther and distinguish what kinds of activity the narcissists are engaging in, since hours of scrolling through your news feed, though time-wasting, isn’t exactly self-centered. And people post online for different reasons. For example, Twitter has been shown to sometimes fulfill a need to connect with others. The trouble with determining what’s normal and what’s narcissism is that both sets of people generally engage in the same online behaviors, they just have different motives for doing so.

A recent study published in Computers in Human Behavior dug into the how and why of narcissists’ social media use, looking at both college students and an older adult population. The researchers measured how often people tweeted or updated their Facebook status, but also why, asking them how much they agreed with statements like “It is important that my followers admire me,” and “It is important that my profile makes others want to be my friend.”

Overall, Twitter use was more correlated with narcissism, but lead researcher Shaun W. Davenport, chair of management and entrepreneurship at High Point University, points out that there was a key difference between generations. Older narcissists were more likely to take to Facebook, whereas younger narcissists were more active on Twitter.

“Facebook has really been around the whole time Generation Y was growing up and they see it more as a tool for communication,” Davenport says. “They use it like other generations use the telephone… For older adults who didn’t grow up using Facebook, it takes more intentional motives [to use it], like narcissism.”

Whereas on Facebook, the friend relationship is reciprocal, you don’t have to follow someone on Twitter who follows you (though it is often polite to do so, if you are the sort of person who thinks of Twitter more as an elegant tea room than, I don’t know, someplace without rules or scruples, like the Wild West or a suburban Chuck E. Cheese). Rather than friend-requesting people to get them to pay attention to you, the primary method to attract Twitter followers is just… tweeting, which partially explains the correlation between number of tweets and narcissism.

Of course, there’s something to be said for quality over quantity—just look at @OneTweetTony and his 2,000+ followers. And you’d think that, even if you gather a lot of followers to you through sheer volume of content spewed, eventually some would tire of your face’s constant presence in their feed and leave you. W. Keith Campbell, head of the University of Georgia’s psychology department and author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, says that people don’t actually make the effort to unfriend or unfollow someone that often, though.

“What you find in real life with narcissists is that they’re very good at gaining friends and becoming leaders, but eventually people see through them and stop liking them,” he says. “Online, people are very good at gaining relationships, but they don’t fall off naturally. If you’re incredibly annoying, they just ignore you, and even then it might be worth it for entertainment value. There’s a reason why, on reality TV, you find high levels of narcissism. It’s entertaining.”

Also like reality TV stars, narcissists like their own images. They show a preference for posting photos on Facebook, but Campbell clarifies that it’s the type of photos that matter—narcissists tend to choose more attractive, attention-seeking photos. In another 2011 study, narcissistic adolescents rated their own profile pictures as “more physically attractive, more fashionable, more glamorous, and more cool than their less narcissistic peers did.”

Though social media is an obvious and much-discussed bastion of narcissism, online role-playing games, the most famous being World of Warcraft, have been shown to hold some attraction as well. A study of 1,471 Korean online gamers showed narcissists to be more likely to be addicted to the games than non-narcissists. The concrete goals and rewards the games offer allow the players to gather prestige: “As you play, your character advances by gaining experience points, ‘leveling-up’ from one level to the next while collecting valuables and weapons and becoming wealthier and stronger,” the study reads. “In this social setting, excellent players receive the recognition and attention of others, and gain power and status.”

And if that power comes through violence, so much the better. Narcissism has been linked to aggression, another reason for the games’ appeal. Offline, narcissists are often bullies, though attempts to link narcissism to cyberbullying have resulted in a resounding “maybe.”

 “Narcissists typically have very high self esteem but it’s very fragile self esteem, so when someone attacks them, that self-esteem takes a dramatic nosedive,” Davenport says. “They need more wins to combat those losses…so the wins they have in that [virtual] world can boost their self-esteem.”

People can tell when you are attempting to boost your self-esteem through your online presence. A 2008 study had participants rate Facebook pages (which had already been painstakingly coded by researchers) for 37 different personality traits. The Facebook page’s owners had previously taken the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, and when it was there, the raters picked up on it.

Campbell, one of the researchers on that study, tempers now: “You can detect it, but it’s not perfect,” he says. “It’s sort of like shaving in your car window, you can do it, but it’s not perfect.”

Part of the reason why may be that, as we see more self-promoting behavior online, whether it’s coming from narcissists or not, it becomes more accepted, and thus, widespread.

Though, according to Davenport, the accusation that Generation Y, or—my least favorite term—Millennials, is the most narcissistic generation yet has been backed up by data, he wonders if it’s less a generational problem than just a general shift in our society.

“Some of it is that you see the behavior more on Facebook and Twitter, and some of it is that our society is becoming more accepting of narcissistic behavior,” Davenport says. “I do wonder if at some point the pendulum will swing back a little bit. Because you’re starting to see more published about ‘Is Gen Y more narcissistic?’, ‘What does this mean for the workplace?’, etc. All those questions are starting to become common conversation.”

When asked if our society is moving in a more narcissistic direction, Campbell replied: “President Obama took a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Selfie was the word of the year in 2013. So yeah, this stuff becomes far more accepted.”

Read the entire article here.

Images courtesy of Google Search and respective “selfie” owners.

I Am Selfie

astronaut-selfie

Presidents, prime ministers, pop stars and the public in general — anyone and everyone armed with a smartphone and a dire need for attention did this in 2013. Without a doubt, 2013 was the year of the narcissistic selfie.

See more selfies here.

Image: Astronaut Luca Parmitano uses a digital still camera to take a photo of himself in space. Courtesy of NASA / Daily Mail.

It’s Pretty Ugly Online

This is a compelling and sad story of people with ugly minds who have nothing better to do than demean others. The others in this story are those that pervade social media in search of attention and a modicum of self-esteem. Which group is in need of most in help? Well, you decide.

From Wired:

Live artist Louise Orwin has created a show—Pretty Ugly—based on her research into the phenomenon of teenage girls discussing body issues on social media.

“OK, guys, this is a serious matter… I want to know whether I’m pretty or not,” says a teenage girl with a high-pitched voice and heavily made-up eyes going by the name of girlsite101.

She goes on to explain with pageant participant peppiness that her classmates say she is pretty and she “wins homecoming queen every year,” but that she’s not convinced. The only way to settle the situation is to ask the impartial commenters of YouTube.

The video has notched up more than 110,000 views and the comments are, frankly, brutal: “Bitch” and “You have an ugly personality and you’re making this shit up. You’re ugly” rank the highest. But there are many, many more: “You look like a bug!”; “You’re ugly as fuck […] You might want to cover up that third eye you twig. And you’re ears are fucking tiny. Like seriously, stick them up your ass. And stop telling lies”; “stupid slut”; “attention seeker”; “a pretty face destroyed by an ugly personality.” There are 5,500 of these comments—the vast majority of them are negative.

Girlsite101’s video is not a one-off. There are almost 600,000 results when you search for “am I pretty or ugly” on YouTube. It’s this phenomenon that live artist Louise Orwin has set out to explore in a performance called Pretty Ugly.

Orwin’s journey started when she came across the “Thinspiration” community on Tumblr, where pictures of slim women—ranging from the naturally slim to the emaciated—are shared as a source of inspiration for those trying to lose weight. “I got obsessed with the way these teenage girls were using Tumblr,” she told Wired.co.uk. “I felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.”

At the same time, Orwin was exploring how teenage girls use social media compared to the outlets she had as a teenager. “When I was a teenager I was writing in a diary; today teenagers are posting onto Tumblr.”

“I was horrified by it”

During the course of her research, she chanced upon one of the aforementioned “am I pretty or ugly?” videos. “I saw a really young girl pouting and posing in front of the camera. Her language was something that struck me. It was really teenage language; she was talking about how boys at school were picking on her but there was one guy who fancied her and she didn’t know why boys didn’t like her,” Orwin explains. The girl on camera then asked whether her audience thought she was pretty or ugly. “I was horrified by it,” said Orwin. “Then you look at the comments below; they were horrific.”

Orwin then spotted the many related videos alongside it. “The thing that struck me is that it seemed like a really brave thing to do. I couldn’t imagine myself posting a video like that because I would have thought that she was opening herself up to a huge amount of criticism.”

After trying to contact some of the girls who made the videos, Orwin decided to post some of her own. She came up with a number of teenage alter-egos: an emo girl called Becky, a nerdy girl called Amanda, and another character called Baby.

“I got torrents of abuse. People were telling me to fuck off and die,” Orwin explained. The emo girl Becky was targeted particularly aggressively. Three weeks after the video was posted, there was a spike of interest and Orwin received 200 comment notifications. One of the comments said: “Your so fucking dumb, yes you are ugly, just because you made this shitty video I think your the ugliest cunt out, take off that eye shadow no girl ever can pull off that much especially not you, and if you really think being ugly is such a surprise to you, life is going to fucking suck for you.”

“I woke up and read all of this abuse and I really felt it in my stomach. I had to remind myself that it’s not me, it’s the character.”

Orwin makes a point about the characters being 15-years-old in her videos (she’s actually 26), but that didn’t stop her from receiving hundreds of private messages, the vast majority from men, many of which were asking for her to send more videos. One man said “I think ur pretty. Don’t let anyone tell u any different OK. Can u do a dance vid so I can see more of sexy u?xx.”

When Orwin sat down to analyze the comments and messages she had received on her videos, she found that 70 percent of the feedback was from men, “and most of them were definitely over 18.” Most of the women who commented were under 18.

One commenter who stood out for Orwin was a user called RookhKshatriya, who wrote under Becky’s video, “You’re a 4 and without glasses you are a 5.” The commenter is actually a London-based academic who works in education and calls himself an “anti-feminist,” believing that the Anglo-American brand of feminism that emerged in the ’60s has an ulterior misandrist agenda. You can check out his blog, Anglobitch, here. “He takes himself very seriously, but he’s going on YouTube and rating 15-year-old girls,” muses Orwin.

One of the things that intrigues Orwin about these videos is that they explore the idea of anonymity as well as performance. “Part of the reason that a lot of them post the videos is yes, they want to know whether they are pretty. But they also see the trend going round and it’s just another subject to make a video on. Which is strange.”

Orwin’s show, Pretty Ugly, follows the trail of her research, looking at the relationships Becky, Amanda, and Baby have with their commenters and the people who messaged them. “Conversations with trolls, friendships… it also covers all the creepy side of it,” she explains.

The show starts with Orwin asking the audience the central question: do they think she is pretty or ugly. “I need to show how irrelevant that question should be. Would you go up to a person on the street and ask them that? I am trying to make this anonymous world into a live face-to-face world.”

Orwin is particularly struck by the way digital media is changing the way we perceive ourselves and each other. “And what does it mean for feminism today?”

When she compares her own teenage years to those being lived out today, she says she remembers getting to a certain age when people were starting to talk about the pressures of the media, which was selling unattainable images of perfection and beauty. “But it was about the media. Now if you look on Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter, it’s not the media, but the teenage girls themselves perpetuating this myth. They are resharing these images, reblogging. There’s always going to be peer pressure but I think [social media] makes these issues worse.”

Read the entire article here.

Me, Myself and I

It’s common sense — the frequency with which you use the personal pronoun “I” tells a lot about you. Now there’s some great research that backs this up, but not in a way that you would have expected.

From WSJ:

You probably don’t think about how often you say the word “I.”

You should. Researchers say that your usage of the pronoun says more about you than you may realize.

Surprising new research from the University of Texas suggests that people who often say “I” are less powerful and less sure of themselves than those who limit their use of the word. Frequent “I” users subconsciously believe they are subordinate to the person to whom they are talking.

Pronouns, in general, tell us a lot about what people are paying attention to, says James W. Pennebaker, chair of the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin and an author on the study. Pronouns signal where someone’s internal focus is pointing, says Dr. Pennebaker, who has pioneered this line of research. Often, people using “I” are being self-reflective. But they may also be self-conscious or insecure, in physical or emotional pain, or simply trying to please.

Dr. Pennebaker and colleagues conducted five studies of the way relative rank is revealed by the use of pronouns. The research was published last month in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology. In each experiment, people deemed to have higher status used “I” less.

The findings go against the common belief that people who say “I” a lot are full of themselves, maybe even narcissists.

“I” is more powerful than you may realize. It drives perceptions in a conversation so much so that marriage therapists have long held that people should use “I” instead of “you” during a confrontation with a partner or when discussing something emotional. (“I feel unheard.” Not: “You never listen.”) The word “I” is considered less accusatory.

“There is a misconception that people who are confident, have power, have high-status tend to use ‘I’ more than people who are low status,” says Dr. Pennebaker, author of “The Secret Life of Pronouns.” “That is completely wrong. The high-status person is looking out at the world and the low-status person is looking at himself.”

So, how often should you use “I”? More—to sound humble (and not critical when speaking to your spouse)? Or less—to come across as more assured and authoritative?

The answer is “mostly more,” says Dr. Pennebaker. (Although he does say you should try and say it at the same rate as your spouse or partner, to keep the power balance in the relationship.)

In the first language-analysis study Dr. Pennebaker led, business-school students were divided into 41 four-person, mixed-sex groups and asked to work as a team to improve customer service for a fictitious company. One person in each group was randomly assigned to be the leader. The result: The leaders used “I” in 4.5% of their words. Non-leaders used the word 5.6%. (The leaders also used “we” more than followers did.)

In the second study, 112 psychology students were assigned to same-sex groups of two. The pairs worked to solve a series of complex problems. All interaction took place online. No one was assigned to a leadership role, but participants were asked at the end of the experiment who they thought had power and status. Researchers found that the higher the person’s perceived power, the less he or she used “I.”

In study three, 50 pairs of people chatted informally face-to-face, asking questions to get to know one another, as if at a cocktail party. When asked which person had more status or power, they tended to agree—and that person had used “I” less.

Study four looked at emails. Nine people turned over their incoming and outgoing emails with about 15 other people. They rated how much status they had in relation to each correspondent. In each exchange, the person with the higher status used “I” less.

The fifth study was the most unusual. Researchers looked at email communication that the U.S. government had collected (and translated) from the Iraqi military, made public for a period of time as the Iraqi Perspectives Project. They randomly selected 40 correspondences. In each case, the person with higher military rank used “I” less.

People curb their use of “I” subconsciously, Dr. Pennebaker says. “If I am the high-status person, I am thinking of what you need to do. If I am the low-status person, I am more humble and am thinking, ‘I should be doing this.’ “

Dr. Pennebaker has found heavy “I” users across many people: Women (who are typically more reflective than men), people who are more at ease with personal topics, younger people, caring people as well as anxious and depressed people. (Surprisingly, he says, narcissists do not use “I” more than others, according to a meta-analysis of a large number of studies.)

And who avoids using “I,” other than the high-powered? People who are hiding the truth. Avoiding the first-person pronoun is distancing.

Read the entire article here.

Night Owl? You Are Evil

New research — probably conducted by a group of early-risers — shows that people who prefer to stay up late, and rise late, are more likely to be narcissistic, insensitive, manipulative and psychopathic.

That said, previous research has suggested that night owls are generally more intelligent and wealthier than their early-rising, but nicer, cousins.

From the Telegraph:

Psychologists have found that people who are often described as “night owls” display more signs of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathic tendencies than those who are “morning larks”.

The scientists suggest these reason for these traits, known as the Dark Triad, being more prevalent in those who do better in the night may be linked to our evolutionary past.

They claim that the hours of darkness may have helped to conceal those who adopted a “cheaters strategy” while living in groups.

Some social animals will use the cover of darkness to steal females away from more dominant males. This behaviour was also recently spotted in rhinos in Africa.

Dr Peter Jonason, a psychologist at the University of Western Sydney, said: “It could be adaptively effective for anyone pursuing a fast life strategy like that embodied in the Dark Triad to occupy and exploit a lowlight environment where others are sleeping and have diminished cognitive functioning.

“Such features of the night may facilitate the casual sex, mate-poaching, and risk-taking the Dark Triad traits are linked to.

“In short, those high on the Dark Triad traits, like many other predators such as lions, African hunting dogs and scorpions, are creatures of the night.”

Dr Jonason and his colleagues, whose research is published in the journal of Personality and Individual Differences, surveyed 263 students, asking them to complete a series of standard personality tests designed to test their score for the Dark Triad traits.

They were rated on scales for narcissism, the tendency to seek admiration and special treatment; Machiavellianism, a desire to manipulate others; and psychopathy, an inclination towards callousness and insensitivity.

To test each, they were asked to rate their agreement with statements like: “I have a natural talent for influencing people”, “I could beat a lie detector” and “people suffering from incurable diseases should have the choice of being put painlessly to death”.

The volunteers were also asked to complete a questionnaire about how alert they felt at different times of the day and how late they stayed up at night.

The study revealed that those with a darker personality score tended to say they functioned more effectively in the evening.

They also found that those who stayed up later tended to have a higher sense of entitlement and seemed to be more exploitative.

They could find no evidence, however, that the traits were linked to the participants gender, ruling out the possibility that the tendency to plot and act in the night time had its roots in sexual evolution.

Previous research has suggested that people who thrive at night tend also to be more intelligent.

Combined with the other darker personality traits, this could be a dangerous mix.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, by Santi di Tito. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Instagram: Confusing Mediocrity with Artistry

Professional photographers take note: there will always be room for high-quality images that tell a story or capture a timeless event or exude artistic elegance. But, your domain is under attack, again — and the results are not particularly pretty. This time courtesy of Instagram.

Just over a hundred years ago, to be a good photographer one required the skills of an alchemist; the chemical processing of plates and prints was more complex, much more time-consuming than capturing the shot itself, and sometimes dangerous. A good print required constant attention, lengthy cajoling and considerable patience, and of course a darkroom and some interesting chemicals.

Then Kodak came along; it commoditized film and processing, expanding photography to the masses. More recently as technology has improved and hardware prices have continued to drop, more cameras have found their ways into the hands of more people. However, until recently access to good quality (yet still expensive) photographic equipment has played an important role in allowing photographers to maintain superiority of their means and ends over everyday amateurs.

Even as photography has become a primarily digital process, with camera prices  continuing to plummet, many photographers have continued to distinguish their finished images from the burgeoning mainstream. After all, it still takes considerable skill and time to post-process an image in Photoshop or other imaging software.

Nowadays, anyone armed with a $99 smartphone is a photographer with a high-resolution camera. And, through the power of blogs and social networks every photographer is also a publisher. Technology has considerably democratized and shortened the process. So, now an image can find its way from the hands of the photographer to the eyes of a vast audience almost instantaneously. The numbers speak for themselves — by most estimates, around 4.2 million images are uploaded daily to Flickr and 4.5 million to Instagram.

And, as the smartphone is to a high-end medium or large format camera, so is Instagram to Photoshop. Now, armed with both smartphone and Instagram a photographer — applying the term loosely — can touch-up an image of their last meal with digital sepia or apply a duo-tone filter to a landscape of their bedroom, or, most importantly, snap a soft-focus, angled self-portrait. All this, and the photographer can still deliver the finished work to a horde of followers for instant, gratuitous “likes”.

But, here’s why Instagram may not be such a threat to photography after all, despite the vast ocean of images washing across the internet.

[div class=attrib]From the Atlantic Wire:[end-div]

While the Internet has had a good time making fun of these rich kid Instagram photos, haters should be careful. These postings are emblematic of the entire medium we all use. To be certain, these wealthy kid pix are particularly funny (and also sad) because they showcase a gross variant of entitlement. Preteens posing with helicopters they did nothing to earn and posting the pictures online for others to ogle provides an easy in for commentary on the state of the American dream. (Dead.) While we don’t disagree with that reading, it’s par for the course on Instagram, a shallow medium all about promoting superficiality that photo takers did little to nothing to earn.

The very basis of Instagram is not just to show off, but to feign talent we don’t have, starting with the filters themselves. The reason we associate the look with “cool” in the first place is that many of these pretty hazes originated from processes coveted either for their artistic or unique merits, as photographer and blogger Ming Thein explains: “Originally, these styles were either conscious artistic decisions, or the consequences of not enough money and using expired film. They were chosen precisely because they looked unique—either because it was a difficult thing to execute well (using tilt-shift lenses, for instance) or because nobody else did it (cross-processing),” he writes. Instagram, however, has made such techniques easy and available, taking away that original value. “It takes the skill out of actually having to do any of these things (learn to process B&W properly, either chemically or in Photoshop, for instance),” he continues.

Yet we apply them to make ourselves look like we’ve got something special. Everything becomes “amaaazzing,” to put it in the words of graphic design blogger Jack Mancer, who has his own screed about the site. But actually, nothing about it is truly amazing. Some might call the process democratizing—everyone is a professional!—but really, it’s a big hoax. Everyone is just pressing buttons to add computer-generated veneers to our mostly mundane lives. There is nothing artsy about that. But we still do it. Is that really better than the rich kids? Sure, we’re not embarrassing ourselves by posting extreme wealth we happened into. But what are we posting? And why? At the very least, we’re doing it to look artsy; if not that, there is some other, deeper, more sinister thing we’re trying to prove, which means we’re right up there with the rich kids.

Here are some examples of how we see this playing out on the network:

The Food Pic

Why you post this: This says my food looks cool, therefore it is yummy. Look how well I eat, or how well I cook, or what a foodie I am.

Why this is just like the rich kids: Putting an artsy filter on a pretty photo can make the grossest slosh look like gourmet eats. It does not prove culinary or photographic skill, it proves that you can press a button.

The Look How much Fun I’m Having Pic

Why you post this: To prove you have the best, most social, coolest life, and friends. To prove you are happy and fun.

Why this is just like the rich kids: This also has an underlying tone of flaunting wealth. Fun usually costs money, and it’s something not everybody else has.

The Picture of Thing Pic

Why you post this: This proves your fantastic, enviable artistic eye: “I turned a mundane object into art!”

What that is just like the rich kids: See above. Essentially, you’re bragging, but without the skills to support it.

Instagram and photo apps like it are shallow mediums that will generate shallow results. They are there for people to showcase something that doesn’t deserve a platform. The rich kids are a particularly salient example of how the entire network operates, but those who live in glass houses shot by Instagram shouldn’t throw beautifully if artfully filtered stones.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Tumblr: Rich Kids of Instgram.[end-div]

GE and EE: The Dark Side of Facebook

That’s G.E. and E.E, not “Glee”. In social psychology circles GE means grandiose exhibitionism, while EE stands for entitlement / exploitativeness. Researchers find that having a large number of “ifriends”on social networks, such as Facebook, correlates with high levels of GE and EE. The greater the number of friends you have online, the greater the odds that you are a chronic attention seeker with shallow relationships or a “socially disruptive narcissist”.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.

The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.

The latest study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also found that narcissists responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site’s public walls and changed their profile pictures more often.

A number of previous studies have linked narcissism with Facebook use, but this is some of the first evidence of a direct relationship between Facebook friends and the most “toxic” elements of narcissistic personality disorder.

Researchers at Western Illinois University studied the Facebook habits of 294 students, aged between 18 and 65, and measured two “socially disruptive” elements of narcissism – grandiose exhibitionism (GE) and entitlement/exploitativeness (EE).

GE includes ”self-absorption, vanity, superiority, and exhibitionistic tendencies” and people who score high on this aspect of narcissism need to be constantly at the centre of attention. They often say shocking things and inappropriately self-disclose because they cannot stand to be ignored or waste a chance of self-promotion.

The EE aspect includes “a sense of deserving respect and a willingness to manipulate and take advantage of others”.

The research revealed that the higher someone scored on aspects of GE, the greater the number of friends they had on Facebook, with some amassing more than 800.

Those scoring highly on EE and GG were also more likely to accept friend requests from strangers and seek social support, but less likely to provide it, according to the research.

Carol Craig, a social scientist and chief executive of the Centre for Confidence and Well-being, said young people in Britain were becoming increasingly narcissistic and Facebook provided a platform for the disorder.

“The way that children are being educated is focussing more and more on the importance of self esteem – on how you are seen in the eyes of others. This method of teaching has been imported from the US and is ‘all about me’.

“Facebook provides a platform for people to self-promote by changing profile pictures and showing how many hundreds of friends you have. I know of some who have more than 1,000.”

Dr Viv Vignoles, senior lecturer in social psychology at Sussex University, said there was “clear evidence” from studies in America that college students were becoming increasingly narcissistic.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image “Looking at You, and You and You”, Jennifer Daniel, an illustrator, created a fan page on Facebook and asked friends to submit their images for this mosaic; 238 of them did so. Courtesy of the New York Times.[end-div]

The Renaissance of Narcissism

In recent years narcissism has been taking a bad rap. So much so that Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) was slated for removal from the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM-V. The DSM-V is the professional reference guide published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists had decided that they needed only 5 fundamental types of personality disorder: anti-social, avoidant, borderline, obsessive-compulsive and schizotypal. Hence no need for NPD.

Interestingly in mid-2010, the APA reversed itself by saving narcissism from the personality disorders chopping block. While this may be a win for narcissists by having their “condition” back in the official catalog, some suggest this is a huge mistake. After all narcissism now seems to have become a culturally fashionable, de rigeur activity rather than a full-blown pathological disorder.

[div class=attrib]From the Telegraph:[end-div]

… You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to see that narcissism has shifted from a pathological condition to a norm, if not a means of survival.

Narcissism appears as a necessity in a society of the spectacle, which runs from Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” prediction through reality television and self-promotion to YouTube hits.

While the media and social media had a role in normalising narcissism, photography has played along. We exist in and for society, only once we have been photographed. The photographic portrait is no longer linked to milestones like graduation ceremonies and weddings, or exceptional moments such as vacations, parties or even crimes. It has become part of a daily, if not minute-by-minute, staging of the self. Portraits appear to have been eclipsed by self-portraits: Tweeted, posted, shared.

According to Greek mythology, Narcissus was the man who fell in love with his reflection in a pool of water. According to the DSM-IV, 50-70 per cent of those diagnosed with NPD are men. But according to my Canadian upbringing looking at one’s reflection in a mirror for too long was a weakness particular to the fairer sex and an anti-social taboo.

I recall doubting Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977-80): wasn’t she just a narcissist taking pictures of herself all day long? At least she was modest enough to use a remote shutter trigger. Digital narcissism has recently gained attention with Gabriela Herman’s portrait series Bloggers (2010-11), which captures bloggers gazing into their glowing screens. Even closer to our narcissistic norm are Wolfram Hahn’s portraits of people taking pictures of themselves (Into the Light, 2009-10).

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Cindy Sherman: the Early Works 1975-77. Courtesy of the Telegraph / Frieze.[end-div]

The Homogenous Culture of “Like”

[div class=attrib]Echo and Narcissus, John William Waterhouse [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons[end-div]

About 12 months ago I committed suicide — internet suicide that is. I closed my personal Facebook account after recognizing several important issues. First, it was a colossal waste of time; time that I could and should be using more productively. Second, it became apparent that following, belonging and agreeing with others through the trivial “wall” status-in-a-can postings and now pervasive “like button” was nothing other than a declaration of mindless group-think and a curious way to maintain social standing. So, my choice was clear: become part of a group that had similar interests, like-minded activities, same politics, parallel beliefs, common likes and dislikes; or revert to my own weirdly independent path. I chose the latter, rejecting the road towards a homogeneity of ideas and a points-based system of instant self-esteem.

This facet of the Facebook ecosystem has an affect similar to the filter bubble that I described is a previous post, The Technology of Personalization and the Bubble Syndrome. In both cases my explicit choices on Facebook, such as which friends I follow or which content I “like”, and my implicit browsing behaviors that increasingly filter what I see and don’t see causes a narrowing of the world of ideas to which I am a exposed. This cannot be good.

So, although I may incur the wrath of author Neil Strauss for including an excerpt of his recent column below, I cannot help but “like” what he has to say. More importantly, he does a much more eloquent job of describing the issue which commoditizes social relationships and, dare I say it, lowers the barrier to entry for narcissists to grow and fine tune their skills.

[div class=attrib]By Neil Strauss for the Wall Street Journal:[end-div]

If you happen to be reading this article online, you’ll notice that right above it, there is a button labeled “like.” Please stop reading and click on “like” right now.

Thank you. I feel much better. It’s good to be liked.

Don’t forget to comment on, tweet, blog about and StumbleUpon this article. And be sure to “+1” it if you’re on the newly launched Google+ social network. In fact, if you don’t want to read the rest of this article, at least stay on the page for a few minutes before clicking elsewhere. That way, it will appear to the site analytics as if you’ve read the whole thing.

Once, there was something called a point of view. And, after much strife and conflict, it eventually became a commonly held idea in some parts of the world that people were entitled to their own points of view.

Unfortunately, this idea is becoming an anachronism. When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition.

But there was one other element of human nature that the Internet still needed to conquer: the need to belong. The “like” button began on the website FriendFeed in 2007, appeared on Facebook in 2009, began spreading everywhere from YouTube to Amazon to most major news sites last year, and has now been officially embraced by Google as the agreeable, supportive and more status-conscious “+1.” As a result, we can now search not just for information, merchandise and kitten videos on the Internet, but for approval.

Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn’t retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.

Conversely, when we’re looking at someone else’s content—whether a video or a news story—we are able to see first how many people liked it and, often, whether our friends liked it. And so we are encouraged not to form our own opinion but to look to others for cues on how to feel.

“Like” culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Instead, we are shaped by our stats, which include not just “likes” but the number of comments generated in response to what we write and the number of friends or followers we have. I’ve seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers than they do.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]