Spring Break is starting here… Have a comic.

By DAVID CRARY AP National Writer

NEW YORK Feb 27, 2007 (AP)— Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

“We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special’ and having children repeat that back,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. “Kids are self-centered enough already.”

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,” “I think I am a special person” and “I can live my life any way I want to.”

Read the full article.

I’m not sure how this advances our understanding of the Millennials in a meaningful way. I think most of us have known that they think of themselves as special and demand more personalized, individual attention than their predecessors. What Professor Twinge blames almost entirely on parenting is also, I think, a result of a ‘long tail‘ product and media atmosphere in general. Not only are teens encouraged to build unique identities, but they are (perhaps for the first time) given the niche tools to actually create that unique persona whereas in the past they were limited to broadcast media, chain stores, etc. that were essentially the same everywhere.

Perhaps this is less a case of an increase in narcissism and more a case of a breakdown of group identity (be it national, regional, or clique). In the past, a common media and product atmosphere forced a sort of conformity and community mentality. With growing globalization and the ability for an individual to specialize and create their own media and product universe, we have less and less in common with our neighbors. I can only imagine a stronger individualism would arise from that situation–and a stronger sense of international community.

Maybe it’s just the AP reporter’s spin, but Professor Twinge’s quoted comments and one-liners seemed a little acid and got old fast. They certainly weren’t academic or helpful. While she touched on MySpace and YouTube as a part of the ‘problem,’ she didn’t go beyond the names of those services in attempting to describe their role in the change in the way teens think of themselves.

Oh. I get it. MySpace and YouTube. Ha. Ha. Ha. :(

[…] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - Blog of Danah Boyd. A PhD student studying privacy and the internet.
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/ - “Social Value and the Social Web”
http://www.fastcompany.com/ - Interesting blog associated with Fast Company magazine.

I am taking a hiatus for the remainder of the summer to finish some hulking, be-fanged programming projects. Once those are complete, I am going to “take off the training wheels” on erelevant–redesign and revision it around a broader central theme. It will be less personal, less inflammatory and more topical and content-oriented. […]

When Time magazine named “You” as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute “user-generated content” as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the […]