It's All About Me

It all started with "25 Random Things About Me" on Facebook. It pretty much spread like SARS. Soon enough we learn that one of your high school friends has a scar on his left knee, or that your ex-colleague eats Cerelac sans hot water while watching Friends, or that a guy you slept with eons ago can SMS while shitting.

(Read what The New York Times and Time Magazine had to say about the... ugh, phenomenon.)

And then last week my newsfeed on Facebook was flooded with results of quizzes that my friends took. These are mostly ludicrous "personality tests" such as "what color are you?", "what kind of woman are you?", "where should you live?", and so on. There was even a quiz on "how gay are you?" (which I took!).

I could've easily ignored the results of these quizzes but really they annoyed me to bits. I just wanted to tell my friends to F off coz I don't care AT ALL. Besides, there's an option to not publish the results of the quizzes. So puhlease, keep your color to your self.

But that's the problem with Facebook; you simply have to let your friends know coz that's what social networking is all about. What bothers me though is that instead of people actually connecting with each other we have in fact spent more time navel gazing and, worse, proclaiming to the world how vapid we exactly are.

Don't you think that Facebook is effectively feeding our inner narcissists?

Most people have this innate need to be heard, which I believe is normal. But social network sites like Facebook, and to a larger extent Twitter and Plurk, gives us these platforms to get as much attention as we can. Oh, mostly undeserved attention, I should say.

Through Twitter for instance, we get feeds like "So and so is having breakfast at Jollibee", or "So and so just arrived home". Wow, groundbreaking! Thanks for telling us about it. But seriously, how can people think that their friends even need to know what their greasy mouth is munching on at the moment?

Exactly how much time do we need to spend on talking about our sorry asses? Even without Facebook and its ilk, I noticed that people are so obsessed with talking (about themselves) and doing less of listening.

How many conversations have you had lately that's mostly one-sided?

Some people can talk endlessly about their boring lives and when you have the two seconds to inject your opinion their eyes would instantly drift only to become animated again when they are back to talking about something "interesting"... about themselves of course.

They cannot help it; they just need to hog the spotlight. There are just some people who need loads of affirmation, no? I call it an issue of low self-esteem, if not outright narcissism.

Honey, wake up coz the world does not revolve around you. [Snap, snap, snap.]

And yes, Facebook comes into the picture to give these people a boost, giving them the illusion that they are the center of the universe.

But who am I to criticize them when I have this blog that offers paean after paean to my gigantic ego? Ha!