Of Myself I Sing

The New York Times:

In April, Rebecca Makkai, a fiction writer, published a satirical piece on the blog for the literary magazine Ploughshares titled “Writers You Want to Punch in the Face(book).” In it, she depicted the Facebook posts of a fictional writer, Todd Manly-Krauss, who is “the world’s most irritating writer.”

Her creation — illustrated by a photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald — is an insufferable and hilarious emblem of posturing machismo who boasts endlessly online about his professional successes (“I am exhausted but exhilarated from this whirlwind tour. Fifteen cities in twenty days! Thank god tomorrow I get to just chill with Terry Gross.”) and the depths of his dark genius (“Sometimes I struggle for hours with my writing, and just when I’m about to throw in the towel, out come the most daring and original 3000 words I’ve written all year. This is a journey, folks.”).

…

That said, much self-promotion on social media seems less about utility and effective advertising and more about ego sustenance. One of the earliest psychological studies of narcissism and Facebook, a 2008 paper by Laura E. Buffardi and W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, found that “narcissistic personality scores were related to … the quantity of information listed about self, self-promoting pictures, and provocative pictures.”

In other words, those who are narcissistic offline also narcissistically overshare online, a conclusion few would dispute.

Read the whole story: The New York Times