[cpressey]

> It’s not sharing, it’s bragging.

Some would call it "narcissism", which (with an appropriately nuanced meaning) I think is more accurate than "bragging".

I strongly agree with the article. Sharing your experiences with social networking isn't necessarily about needing to get validation from others on your experience in order for the experience to feel complete for you... but for some people, it is. And I have to wonder, the more prevalent social networking becomes, are more and more people going to use it as their image-of-self crutch? And I have to wonder, what does such a society look like after a few decades? It's a bit like Warhol's "15 minutes of fame", except minutes are the wrong unit of measure. Everybody's a 15 milligram celebrity...

[JDGM]

Regarding what this looks like in a few decades, I talked elsewhere in the thread about slideshow evenings and it was correctly pointed out these are exclusively thought of as a joke. I believe that's where we're going: we'll mock the narcissistic behaviour out of the culture. This is a good start: http://youtu.be/Nn-dD-QKYN4. Of course, a new thing will come along and it all repeats.