The Narcissism Epidemic - Living in the age of entitlement

p.1 A book called "My beautiful mommy" explains plastic surgery to young children whose mothers are going under the knife for the trendy mommy makeover.

p.14 As an NBC public service announcemnet puts it, "You may not realize it, but everyone is born with their one tru love -themselves. If you like you, everyone else will, too." ... "loving yourself means knowing how great you are and not letting any person, any place, or any thing ever get in the way of that," writes Diane Mastromarino in her aptly titled 2003 book, The Girl's Guide to loving Yourself."

p.20 Narcissistic Personality inventory (NPI) test

p.26 New methods in social psychology have made it much easire o answer such questions. The Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed by Tony Greenwald of Uni. of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, measures how fast people can associate 2 concepts. The IAT was first used to measure racial prejudice. in that version, pictures of what and blck faces appear on a computer screen enxt to words like good and bad. in the first round, test takers press the key on the side of the keyboard under "good" if a white face appears and under "bad" if a black face appears. They then do the reverse, pairing white faces with "bad" and black faces with "good". The computer measures how fast people can press the key for wach pairing; being able to pair white faces with good faster than black faces shows a preference for whites (http://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit). Many people who express little prejudice in explicit surveys still show an implicit racial prejudice on this test. Aythor Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote about unconscious associations in his book Blink and who is biracial himself, was embarassed to discover that he found it hard to pair blac faces wth good but easy to do the same for whiate faces. The test is an intriguine measure of out true beliefs--the unconscious feelings and associations we have absorbed from our culture.

p.34 A majaroty (57%, oin a June 2009 national poll of more than 1000 college students) said that one of the main reasons for their generation's self-centeredness was social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and twitter.


p.50 Self-esteem also isn't a consistent predictor of status or leadership. WHEN GROUP MEMBERS VARY IN SELF-ESTEEM, HIGH SELF ESTEEM PEOPLE GAIN STATUS IN THE GROUP. but when most people in the group are high in self-esteem--which happens more and more with self-esteem on the rise-- high-self-esteem peopl cant all attain the status they seek. At that point, those who are likable and care for others emerge as the group leaders.

p.94 Kendall Myers hired the company Celeb 4 A Day to send 3 "personal paparazzi" to folloe her and her friends around on a girlls' night out.
"It's as of being famous has become a right."

p.109 Social networking for narcissists
Less positive is the sizable number of people who apparently use MySpace and Facebook to seek as much attention as possible for waring as little as possible.
"Is there narcissism [on fACEBOOK]?
.. "like that eternally distracting reflecting pool of Greek lore, the Facebook profile can become an abyss of self-love that consumes one entirely... [E]ven the most socially competent among us tend to enjoy photo=documenting our social successes, so that those poor souls who are less gifted migt at least witness our revelry. Facebook turns out to be the perfect venue for such showcasing. However, most people are still more interested in "stalking the profiles of others than in primping their own."

p.110 The structure of the sites rewards the skills of the narcissist, such as self-promotion, selecting flattering photos of oneself, and having the most friends.

p.113 teh MySpace personaily
Social networking sites encourage users to highligh only certain aspects of themselves. First users can choose to present only the most attractive or cool pictures of themselves.
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p. 117-8 Blogs, comment sectons, and the valuing of everyone's opinion (Even if it's stupid)
In practice, they often descend into uninformed thirdhand banality reminiscent of the way urban legends get started... no, journalists aren't always right, but they've at least been trained to consider issues with a degree of objectivity. Our modern culture instead says, "Everybody's opinion is just as valid as everyone else's," and now backs up this notion on the Internet with the proliferation of blogs and comment sections. The problem is that most of the people who leave comments have no earthly idea what they are talking about. They think they do--common among people with a tendency toward narcissim--but they're clueless. The comments that do say something intelligent are often lost in the mountain of ignorance.
Comments also invite conflict. The comments sections on sites like YouTube descend into hostility remakably quickly. perhaps becuase they can be anonymous, people say things on these sites that they would never say to someone's face. Political arguments on newspaper comment sites get contentious quickly, and it's very difficult to separate truth from opinion. Web 2.0, says Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur, is "ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule."

p.101 the quest for infamy and the rise of incivility
Much of this is driven by the anonymity of the internet, uet these viriolic commens display an unmistakable narcissim. There is the nager and verbal aggression against someone who dares to disagree. There is the assumption that "my opinion matters." yet, at the same time, the stubborn insistence that other people's opinions are wrong or irrelevant.