Remember when the Internet was supposed to isolate us all? Now new ways to socialize online pop up every time you turn around.
The flavor of the month is Pinterest.com, a site that lets you virtually “pin” pictures you find around the Web. Recipes, nail-polish colors, home-decor ideas and organizational strategies all get pinned into cataloged boards and, of course, shared with friends.
It’s addictive — and revealing:Wonder no more if your friend’s sister’s husband has a good tip for cleaning toilets. But it’s only the latest in a line of social media sites giving homes to esoteric hobbies or random pieces of advice, this time with a visual component.
Somewhere along the line, social-media sites stopped being as much about keeping in touch with old friends, and more about interacting with acquaintances. (After all, it’s nearly impossible to lose touch with anyone anymore.) More than ever, they seem to be forums for a life lived online.
We don’t just upload photos for storage; we share and comment on them on Flickr. We don’t just read articles online; with a click of a “like” button, or automatically, we let our social circle know about it on Facebook.
Our offline activities are shared, too — what’s the point of going out if you don’t check in on Foursquare and let the world know, or Yelp your review of dinner?
We don’t just shop on Amazon, we review products for other potential buyers. Even deal sites like Woot have a “community” component.
But why does everything have to be so social?
A study from Western Illinois University, just published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, links social-media usage, and our constant need to share, to narcissism.The more online friends you have and the more you interact with them, the study claims, the higher the likelihood you might be a “socially disruptive” narcissist — obsessed with yourself to the exclusion of everything around you.
That might be a plausible explanation for some, but it doesn’t explain why so many Web sites that don’t really need a social component still insist on letting us interact with each other while we do mundane things online. Are we all socially disruptive narcissists now?
Sure, site owners are hoping to strike it Facebook rich, or at least to boost their ad revenues. They want you to you hang around the site longer, and build relationships with others who do the same.
But clearly people want the online interaction. Why? Maybe it’s just that social interaction takes much less effort online than it does in our offline lives.
We might chit-chat to each other while buying cough medicine online, but ignore each other at the drug store down the street — especially if we’re not close friends.
And while you might evade your friend’s sister’s husband in person, especially if he comes brandishing his toilet advice, passively paying attention to him online might even be useful. So it’s hard to say whether sharing everything makes you a narcissist or just a modern lazy person.
Of course, it’s also getting harder to say which life is the “real” one: the one online where we share, communicate and socialize all the time — or the one offline, where we don’t.
Twitter: @KarolNYC