Am I a Narcissist?

One of my valued colleagues was discussing blogging with me, and said he didn't feel like blogging because he doesn't feel as if he has anything to say that is all that interesting. I replied that I felt the same way until I started blogging, at which point he said this is a condition known as "narcissism." What scares me is that he's in the field of mental health!

But, of course, I've wondered before whether this form of communication is excessively narcissistic, with the blogger's entries' appearing large and the commenters' appearing smaller and accessed on a different, remote, page. You have to assume that someone wants to hear what you're saying to be a blogger. Is my ego out of control when I sit down to write these blog entries?

In the end, I decided to begin to blog, because I simply couldn't exist as a person interested in literacy and not be part of the blogosphere. Plus, I had a good picture to use. So, narcissistic or not, here I am.

On a somewhat related note, in the March 31 issue of The New Yorker, there is article by Eric Alterman that paints a very grim picture of the current state of the newspaper business. The article focuses on the Huffington Post web site as an example of how the newspaper business just doesn't get it, how news is participatory now, how people need to discuss issues and stories, and have more of a need to shape the news. Interestingly, after all this, the article has a twist ending (perhaps predictably coming from one of the temples of fact checking), that we will still need paid journalists that follow some journalistic ethics and who have the time to dig into a story.

But why do we always assume that print is beyond reproach? Can anyone forget The Weekly World News?

The bottom line is that, fact checking or not, people are not waiting 24 hours for their hard copy of the newspaper to land on their doorsteps anymore. And even if they did, they are going to want to discuss it in a more interactive environment than they've ever had before, to comment on it, and to share it with their friends, to look at it embedded with links to graphics, sound, and video. Are these new forms more narcissistic than the old forms? Maybe, but that was then; this is now. People need to "get with the 90s."

My neighbor, Jack Gieck, writes about the canal days of old-time Akron. He can tell you all kinds of things about the beauty of that form of transportation. But, is anyone going back to that form, no matter how beautiful it was?

Oh well, I better go check how this blog entry looks before I post it. And check how many comments I got on my last post.