New Narcissism
New Narcissism is the modern term for the phenomenon narcissism.The term “narcissism” was used for the first time in relation to psychiatry by Sigmund Freud to describe the phenomenon of “loving yourself”. The notion derived from the Greek mythology’s legend about Narcissus, a handsome young man searching for the love of his life. Narcissus found it when he saw his own face, reflected in the water.
This word now has a wide range of meanings; from psychological symptoms, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait encompassing characteristics like arrogance, egoism, vanity and selfishness.
Sarfaz Manzoor’s article “Me, Me, Me” tells us that psychologists’ recent studies conclude a disturbing increase of narcissistic behavior.
Christopher Lasch claims in his work, The culture of Narcissism, that society reproduces its culture in the form of the individual’s personality. So, according to this theory New Narcissism is part of our culture.
People set big goals as beauty, wealth and fame. Ordinary people can easily achieve their “beauty”, boost their self-esteem and confidence with plastic surgeries. Too much effort is put on the appearance and only for people’s own benefits. Fame, and thus wealth, can be achieved for example through the Internet. The Internet has a big impact on our narcissistic culture because everyone can get heard, and nobody can stop you from saying what you want. In the Internet’s virtual world, it’s possible to create, manipulate and improve your own reality in parallel to the real world. The problem is that sometimes it gets hard to distinguish the real from the virtual.
New Narcissism is simply the term for the current generation that is willing to do everything; even suffer absolute humiliation, to achieve instant fame and wealth.

Text 2 “Student narcissism on the rise” (2007) and the article “Me, Me, Me” are both mentioning the lead professor Jean Twenge from San Diego State University, who has surnamed this generation “Generation Me”. Janice McDuffee is presenting the narcissistic youth’s as a danger. That’s because people are way too optimistic. She blames the parents for pampering their children and not preparing them for the real tough world. According to Twenge’s book, this leads to a generation of students that see themselves as exceptional. They are expecting too much, and strive for unrealistic goals they are unlikely to achieve. These high expectations are dangerous because the youth aren’t considering social issues like the housings rising prices and healthcare when they think about the future.
The Text 3, written by Catherine West, has the opposite opinion. Former president Jimmy Carter is also a professor at a university. He muses that he hasn’t detected any significant changes in the youth’s attitude toward themselves the past twenty years. The Association for Psychological Science supports this statement because they found no evidence that young people have amplified impressions of themselves compared to the precedent generation. Psychologist Kali Trzesniewski of the Western Ontario and her colleagues, measured narcissism – here as a personal trait – in over 25.000 college students from 1996 to 2007. They were unable to prove that the level of narcissism has increased when they compared the data to a previous study conducted in the late 70's to mid 80's.

The two texts are completely contradictory, which is bizarre because it seems like both views are warranted by two very similar scientific investigations. One of the surveys implies 16.475 students from across the USA from 1982-2006. This survey was conducted over a longer period, whereas the second study included a larger number of individuals, but over a shorter period of time. The definition of narcissism is not equally specified in the texts: we know that Kali Trzesniewski’s study measures narcissism as a personal trait, but we don’t know how Jean Twenge measured the youth’s narcissism.
Though these articles seem to try to give a comparative picture, the perspectives are very different. Therefore it’s difficult to determine which one of them is the most convincing.

The social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn are fantastic communication tools, which have simply changed the communication culture, and our understanding of “friends”. These sites give you the opportunity to keep in touch with friends and family you don’t see very often and who may live fare away. You can share your tastes, interests and opinions with people without having to justify them.
These are some good aspects of these social websites, but there’s a risk of developing a superficial relationship with people, based on a virtual identity that may not be not be the “real” you. You create a profile of yourself where you have a control over the way people see you. This contributes to the phenomenon New Narcissism as you make your appearance attractive to the world. For example, people crop of they overweight friends because they make them look fat, photoshop pimples away, and keep only the “good looking” pictures. These sites are about the individual since you post what you’re doing right now, and say what’s on your mind at the very moment. It’s a very “noisy” place because nobody can tell you to shut up.
Facebook is a good way of communication, but can of course be abused by unreasonable people. Those kind of social networks are open places for bullying, racism, pedophilia, etc. There are also the risks of social handicaps, if there’s a lack of contact with actual people from the “real” world.

To conclude, there will always be endless discussions with both advantages and disadvantages about the Internet. We can only hope that those who use the Internet are aware and wise enough to use it with respect toward other people.