Web 2.egO

I’ve been pondering, recently, the rise of narcissism as a disease of our world. Depression used to be the problem, everyone swallowing handfuls of Prozac and eating chocolate cake in their pyjamas. Now, I believe, fuelled by our inherent egomania and facilitated by (among many other things) Web 2.0 social-networking sites, a kind of global narcissistic personality disorder has developed.

Forget, for a moment, the countless pages of cheesy hype in favour of social networking and social media. Of course we know that it enables much more content to be generated, some of it interesting, by interesting people who used to be voiceless. And of course we know it allows people to connect, share, interact. Blah blah.

So is it just me or is all of this starting to sound like marketing? The big tee-up to the next generation of unwanted promotional messages? And if it is, what are the marketing geniuses of tomorrow using to make the medium work?

The answer is: your ego. Can it be that simple, you ask? Can we ignore all the post-structuralist analyses and philosophical debates and just understand Web 2.0 as a big, fat, greasy, chocolate-coated world of me, me, me, me, me, me?

Yes, kids. I think we can.

My evidence is anecdotal, rather than statistical. It’s also common sense. I have a friend who is an ardent blogger (who doesn’t?). She has a profile on Facebook and a fairly popular blog. What are her biggest concerns? How many friends she has on Facebook (300 or more on last count), and how many hits she gets on her blog.

Now, I’m not picking on her, but the fact is she’s a bit of an egomaniac. She must be. What else would you call someone who writes up details of everything she does each evening, how work is going, what’s going on in her relationship — and then measures how many random strangers visit it?

And that’s the tip of Iceberg 2.0. The latest piece of madness to grip the web is sites such as Twitter and Pownce, which allow people to share blow-by-blow events of their lives with friends and strangers: “Jarred is writing his new Thought Leader blog”, “Jarred is wondering how people will respond”, “Jarred is thinking that a lot of Web 2.0-ers will be lambasting him for this”.

Blogging (in the true sense, not the fancy-dress op-ed one finds on TL), along with its endless associated content generation incarnations such as moblogging, vblogging and podcasting, is nothing but the fetishisation of the individual. And, I would also argue, the externalisation of self-worth into the cloud. And how little it takes to prop up the ego: 10 hits from a handful of friends and family, and the blogger feels like he’s just become editor of the New York Times.

It’s exactly the same impulse that has spawned the monster that is reality TV. Only it’s bigger, badder and made on a PC near you.

My friend Vincent wrote a blog piece a while ago — a very good article, by the way — in which he used stats from his Amatomu site to compare the traffic to his and other blogs over 2007. Apart from being fun, this article just underlines my point. Was Vincent or Matthew the most popular blogger in 2007? What about Eric Edelstein vs Vinny Lingham?

I understand, of course, that one can correlate this stuff to real-world events, and maybe it means Vinny or Eric is the hottest VC-funded guy around. But the fact that this is public, the fact that there even exists the information that lets me find out my popularity versus somebody else — what is that but pure, unadulterated narcissism?

The flipside of narcissism, by the way, is jealously. There is a very particular kind of rotten-fleshed envy in the hearts of those losing out in the popularity game. How does that bastard end up so high in the Google search results all the time? Why is her blog Amatomu’s most popular all the time? Why is that other TL contributor always in the daily emailer, when I write my ass off and never get in the spotlight? You know what I mean. It feels like when you were the last boy not to get picked for the touch-rugby game at first break.

Is sharing caring? Or is sharing comparing (hee haw)? Simply a way of checking out the other, and ending up either affirmed or gutted?

How to get yourself ranked higher is more than a pastime; it’s big business. Search-engine optimisation is a euphemism for “look like you’re more important than anyone else”. And there are people who spend a lot of time on this. Making themselves famous is practically their day job.

If I may end, then, with this: there is something seriously messed up about all this stuff. I don’t know whether it’s the mobile phone companies and corporate marketers that are rubbing their greedy little hands together with each visit to MyDigitalLife and Facebook. Or if it’s the prospect of having to live in a world in which individual worth has been reduced to how many cool photos I can upload on any given afternoon. Or if it’s the loss of the “privacy” of the internet, which has become a dumping ground for old, rusted crap you see out of the train window when commuting through the housing estates of England.

I’m not saying it’s gonna end. Quite the contrary. We are heading deeper into the narcissistic world order. It’s going from big fun to big money, and when that happens things tend to bed themselves down.

I kind of can’t bear it. But here it comes anyway.