GENERATION ME

Samantha RussellFILM260

Are todays young people more narcissistic than previous generations?

With the explosion of social media websites, it has become nearly impossible

for an individual to not make an online profile

Keeping in touch with friends and family, used for business or pleasure, social media

websites are a bandwagon everyone has hopped onto

Easily accessible on any smart phone, tablet, or computer, you are constantly

connected wherever you go

So, why have we be labeled

‘generation me’, and the

most narcissistic

generation to date?

“Can we pin the tail on Mark Zuckerburg and the advent of Facebook?”- Huffington Post

Being bombarded by social media sites asking us for personal details about our lives, current relationship status, the school we attend, amongst many other things triggers the narcissistic behavior to talk about ourselves, via updating our online profiles

Selfies

Oversharing

Online Identity

Photo tagging

Social Proof

StatusUpdates Identity

TheftPersonalEbranding

What makes us Narcissistic…

“Incidence for narcissistic personality is nearly 3 times as high for people in

their 20’s as for the generation that is now 65 and over”- Time Magazine

Being so self involved can lead to loneliness. The constant need to keep on top of our online profiles, adding new friends, liking

pages and photos, is an obsession with limited rewarding aspects

…has taken on a superficial connotation. It defines our thirst for social media

acceptance

“We are so consumed by the number of likes we rack up on any given post, we often go as far as to skip the wait and outright ask

people to like our posts.”- Elite Daily

“Getting under 11 likes on an Instagram post is like going to prom without a date… it’s social media suicide”- Elite Daily

At the end of the day, sure, you got 25 likes on a selfie posted online…but just because you get the most likes and emoticon hearts doesn’t mean you’re the most liked person. But the popularity your photo brought in enables a narcissistic feeling of importance, which triggers us to post more often about ourselves

Studies pertaining to narcissistic behavior have revealed that those individuals that score higher on the questionnaire tend to have more friends on Facebook, tag themselves in more photos, and update their status’ more frequently- Huffington Post

The problem with the rise in social networking is that people create unrealistic portraits of themselves; adding only the most attractive selfies, updating status’ when they’re doing something interesting, and keeping count of the likes received on the photo just uploaded

Narcissism is a primary factor of using social networking sites because people believe that other’s are interested and care about what they’re doing, what they’re eating, who they’re with, and what they look like

When we look at the 750 Facebook friends we may have…how many of them do you actually keep in touch with? Which ones are acquaintances versus real friends? It’s a strange concept to think that a large portion of the ‘friends’ we have on Facebook, we don’t really know

But social media sites are not all to blame, studies have shown that millennial babies tend to be more focused on being wealthy, successful, and independent. We are all narcissistic to some capacity, having self esteem and feeling good about yourself are traits of narcissism. However, it is social networking sites that exaggerates the egotistical quality within ourselves

Social networking has become apart of us that we carry around and use every single day, no wonder there has been a general increase in narcissism amongst our generation

Sources

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-firestone/facebook-narcissism_b_1905073.html

• http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-narcissism-epidemic/201308/how-dare-you-say-narcissism-is-increasing

• http://time.com/247/millennials-the-me-me-me-generation/

• http://elitedaily.com/humor/generation-obsessed-liked/

• https://www.flickr.com/