At least every little egomaniac who lines up to try out for America’s
Got Talent or whatever has to get off his/her butt to do it. Not so with
MySpace, which is not about doing anything other than gushing over
yourself and your friends /about the way they look/.

Would the asserted levels of adolescent narcissism lessen if MySpace and
other technologies that encourage this personal OCD went away? Yup, I
surely think they would– at least to some degree. But it’s moot, so
whatever.

As a parent, I try do what I can to ensure that very little unmitigated time in front of a computer is an option for my kid, and encourage engagement in other activities.

I think that in many ways, networking sites are about getting that “stamp of approval.” If people think they’re all that, they want others to acknowledge it as well. For the people that don’t have especially high self-esteems, I think many of them seek out that approval as well in hopes of feeling better about themselves. I think some are just desperate for attention and approval.

To me, the people that seem the most well-adjusted on these networking sites are the ones that have minimal information posted about themselves, less than one page of pictures, not receiving or posting comments everyday (friends that are really close tend to keep in contact in person or over the phone, right?) and less than around 70 friends.

I would break that down to… the ego’s version of “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it… did it really happen?”

Maybe its Schrodinger’s cat ad infinitum out here on the net… Except it involves millions of people constantly peeking in the box… just to be sure.

I’d just chime in on “meritocracy” to say that the myth is that by framing things in terms of that theoretical construct, you obscure how “merit” is determined.

Even granted one could set up a meritocracy, you’d still have to decide whether reward comes from how hard you work or from the value of one’s final achievement.

Is there really a connection between the two? Don’t many geniuses reel off amazing things without working? and don’t some people work as hard as they can but simply not produce something very good at the end of it?

And how do we define valuable anyway? What if different people value the product of labor (or genius) differently – how does a meritocracy decide what is the correct value to reward?

And how does a meritocracy work with the idea that valuable things can (and often are) be created collectively? Can you really allocate reward on an individual basis when people rely on a variety of networked resources (shared knowledge, culture, communication, education). Maybe the merit reward should go to the producer’s high school math teacher?

That said, I hope the undeserved-self-esteem movement dies, soon. The whole idea that people can feel good about themselves entirely outside of their accomplishments, goals, achievements, choices and activities is so completely destructive in so many ways–narcissism is just the most recently documented.

Have you (or anyone) tried to model the system of feedbacks in around some of the myths/concepts you’re talking about, ala systems dynamics? That would be a fascinating way to think about how this whole system of cultural ideas and mechanisms supports itself.

I never really thought about the self-esteem concepts in schools and what they do. I was on the other side of that barrier, which I attribute to why I was successful. Low self esteem = more work ethic, but too low = meth addict and too high = narcissists who later become disillusioned. Most of my peer group ended up in the “too low” category, something I suspect happens a lot in the urban poor situation as well, since success = quantity of stuff.

Meritocracy is not a lottery: it asks people to work hard and prove themselves — exactly what Kathy said above about working your ass off. This is largely true in the US; well, as true as our other ideals like democracy are, i.e. definitely busted in some places and in some ways, but basically working. Real statistics show that social mobility between classes is much higher in the US than in Europe (although it’s been declining lately.) So it’s an odd choice for you to single out a 30-year-old British book as bolstering that claim.

Moreover, unions are really anti-meritocratic, I think. Through collective action they try to round off differences in the merit of individual workers, so it becomes difficult or impossible for people to be rewarded (or punished) according to their competence. And a big part of the decline of unions has to do with internationalization of labor — the US steel and auto workers lost their cushy place because there are lots of poor but highly motivated workers in third world countries who are eager to do the same work. That’s simply extending meritocracy to the rest of the world.

It’s the idea of the lottery, of fabulously high-status positions that only a tiny number of people that can attain (pro sports player, movie star, rock idol), that’s so pernicious. People seem to have no idea of the actual odds involved, of just how many other people they’re competing against. But they set their goals on these instead of on good and achievable positions that they could actually stand a chance of reaching if they worked at it.

I think most of the problem is the age-old American vice of anti-intellectualism. None of those celebrity roles involve much actual thinking or mental effort. We don’t tend to revere people for their intelligence or brilliant creativity, unfortunately, and this is more exacerbated the farther down the class hierarchy you go. Why is that?