Does Social Media Entail Narcissism?

It is evident in this day in age that the influence of social media is rapidly increasing due to the recent technological improvements. A large percent of the population would say that they can’t be without their phone for more than twenty minutes. There is a constant need to stay up to date on what is going on around you. Whether it be texts from your family or emails from work, people are always on edge due to their urge not miss anything.

Social Media is something that allows people access to much more than just connecting with family. This all being said does this all entail or result in narcissism? Narcissism is selfishness, involving a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy, and a need for admiration, as characterizing a personality type. The two claims made in this reading were by Soraya Mehdizadeh who argued for yes, and Alex Lambert, who argued for no.

Soraya claims that narcissism and self-esteem are a sort of manifest in facebook.

However, Lambert states that facebook is actually used to seek intimacy with other people rather than fulfilling narcissistic desires. Soraya Mehdizadeh, agrees that Facebook can have negative consequences and that Facebook is a fertile environment for people to express narcissistic tendencies. Because Facebook provides people with a means to develop and maintain a network of friends and acquaintances, with the express purpose of sharing personal information with that network, it can become an ideal setting for people with narcissistic personalities to feed their self-gratifying desires and to boost their low self-esteem.

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On the other hand, Scholars find that certain SNS’s, Facebook in particular, are deeply embedded in everyday life, weaving through online and offline experience. Facebook has been referred to as a ‘pervasive technology’, ‘deeply ingrained in [peoples’] daily routines’.

In my time on social media it is evident that social media has a mean backhand, which just so happens to be the idea of narcissism. It is evident that social media is in many people’s mind a competition. Once one joins an app something in their mind triggers there competitive nature. People want to be the best of the best and believe that the more followers you possess on a social media app determines your social status. Certain people are only pictured or hang out with people they think are “of their stature”. Apps such as instagram, twitter, and snapchat all feed narcissism to its user in encouraging them to gain as many followers as possible. Mehdizadeh study shows only the correlations between those who have been classified as having a narcissistic personality and low self-esteem and their use of Facebook. I agree that narcissism is a big factor in social media and that the owners of these apps are beginning to realize that as well. Narcissism should be cut out of apps in order to purify the peace of community.

Works Cited

1. “Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking (2010)
2. “Discovering Intimacy on Facebook,” Macmillan (2013)