Social network narcissism

I just read a very thought-provoking post on narcissism by danah. It reminded me of lots of things bubbling around in my head before, such as Danny's essay on the death of privacy online and Chris Locke's ongoing documentation of the self-esteem virus (including this latest post). As for reality TV, I also see it as a grab for extreme power over a few instead of diffuse power over many by the broadcasters.

I'm also reading Publics and Counterpublics on danah's recommendation, which makes a distinction between the notion of the general public, and the different publics we are each addressing when blogging or making profiles on Social Network sites. In these activities we are performing to a public of our own, and we can feel invaded when a wider public pays attention, as in Danny's discussion above - danah has said that children's MySpace public includes 'everyone except parents and teachers'. Coping with fame becoming a smooth continuum rather than a sharp dichotomy is something else we need to work on in a power-law distributed long tail world.

Update: John Scalzi is grappling with simialr issues in his SFWA campaign.

Technorati Tags: long tail, power law, social, software, tagcamp