NYT: The Online Looking Glass

Yesterday’s New York Times Op-Ed by Ross Douthat explains that social media exacerbates egotistic, self-centered behavior. And this is the first time anyone has ever said something about the “Facebook Generation” being narcissistic, so I was stunned! The funny thing about “The Online Looking Glass” is that it accuses the Facebook generation of narcissism while using the 46 year old Representative Anthony Weiner as its exemplar. And while there is certainly something to say for a generation of people who grew up always connected and always prompted to share (and yes, media does affect our messages), I still believe that chalking it up to narcissism is too easy. I believe there’s more there.

I spent the tail-end of undergrad and then all of graduate school working with adolescents to understand how they were using social media — mainly because I didn’t want teens to be without an advocate or a voice in this debate. And while it’s necessarily true that there’s a certain emphasis on the self while using social media– it’s my belief that the self is communally constructed in this generation like never before. We aren’t inwardly focused when we post links, photos, videos, status updates — we’re really focused on The Other and how we’re going to engage our followers, our friends, our online communities. We want reactions and we want conversations. We are cool if we know what’s going on around the world because it means we know how to use social media to be social.

danah boyd, who is one of my intellectual mentors and an inspiration to anyone interested in how teens and adolescents use OSNs, recently posted a work-in-progress paper to her twitter. Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies, discusses how teenagers, while they don’t have the social agency that adults have, do have an understanding of how privacy works. The problem is the chasm between their media literacy and their agency — they are living in world where attitudes, practices, and strategies toward privacy differ largely depending on generational understanding of the very word. Additionally, a lot of people in their 20s don’t have access to the Internet — and Facebook is a global network. Isn’t calling out a specific US American, socioeconomic, group being a little short-sighted?

So, while the point of writing an Op-Ed column is to make a very specific argument and stand by it, I always take pause with labelling certain generations with such negative connotations. Indeed, at 25 I’m part of the me generation — a generation that the NYT also claims “doesn’t want to grow up” but then refuses to acknowledge how we’ve come to where we are. Contrary to what many think, my friends would kill for a job with 401k and health insurance guarantee, but too many of them simply can’t find them and have to string together part time jobs. Many of us don’t think that the Tao Lin/ Megan Boyle/ Bebe Zeva phenomenon speaks to us. Most of us roll our eyes and then worry about paying our rent.

What do you think? Is this argument tired? Is it as black and white as it seems? Is there more to the story? Is everyone narcissistic and we’re all going to cave inward from the pressure of our own, sad unexamined and superficial lives?

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