Are Social Media Addicts Really Addicts?
So, if anyone hasn’t seen it yet, Twitter and social media in general has officially joined video games, computers, science fiction, fantasy, and super-heroes as being classified as for people with no lives and no friends.
Now, as I often gloat over when I think of the head of the football team at my old high school pursuing his challenging career in the ever-growing fast food industry, all the things that I used to get made fun off for being interested in are now the facts of life for everyone and big money-makers. The bands I liked now have their critical and commercial success (Radiohead and Daft Punk both appeared at the Grammy’s, for example), everybody loves Batman, Lord of the Rings, and Transformers, and the amount of technological toys we all use constantly would put what made me a “geek” in 1991 to shame in both power and complexity.
So this video, with its classic image of people using a new technological toy as people with no lives and no friends, just makes me sure that social media is becoming a firmly established reality of life. But the video makes another attack…it implies that we are narcissists with a process addiction. I don’t consider myself a narcissist, and my streams pretty much back that up; only about 10% of my content is about me at all. However, I know plenty of people in social media who never do anything but promote their business or talk about themselves. Every conversation is about them or whatever they are selling.
A lot of time we just think of them as people who aren’t getting the idea of social media, that it is not just another channel to market through and that while it does grant influence, that influence is inherently dependent on mutual engagement. But what if that’s not true? Could it be that social media creates a natural channel for those of us who are narcissists or suffering from similar personality disorders to express and act out those disorders? In fact, could it not be the case that social media would reward and encourage those people, thus actually enabling and making worse a serious personality disorder? What do you think?
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