Great people have said that theres no love like self love. Anyone wishing to misconstrue that to suit their own nefarious purposes are free to, so long as its not on the comments section :D ..
What embodies self love more than monuments to the self ?? Pharoahs built monuments to themselves. Roman dictator Caligula had 17 stone masons each carve out 3 statues a year depicting him neck up, and roman atheletes neck down.
Anyhoo, most of us dont have the time or the money to comission odes our god given beauty. We do what we've been doing for 2 million years now - improvise.
A guy named Orkut Buyukkokten came up with the social networking idea with Orkut, and then Mark Zuckerberg came up with Facebook. Both these websites offer its members the freedom to upload photos. Unlimited number of photos.
BANG. It was like the WalMART for compulsive narcissist. I was logging into Orkut sometime ago, when I noticed in the 'recent updates' section that one of my friends had uploaded 17 photos of himself, all different poses. I would like to emphasise 'poses'. The same clothes, same hairstyle, same everything except the 'pose'. You can equate 'pose' to stance, look on the face, whatever.
I could not resist a small q and a.
Me : Dude, why all the photos ? is that like On-Demand, or launching a new product ?
Compulsive Narcissist (CN) : WTF ? uve uploaded photos of urself too !!
DISCLAIMER : True. I did uploaded photos of myself. Photos that I thought brought out the best looking me. But hey, thats just 1 photo, among other non-me photos, and recommonded for upload by entitites other than myself.
CN : So what ? I have other photos too ! Hypocrite !
Me : Ok. Your album has 158 photos, 20 of which feature you standing in front of a wall, photographing yourself. And of the 158, 16 dont have you, but they are pictures of wallpapers hooked off some other websites. and 40 have you standing with other people....
CN : So?
Me : Nothing, im just surprised that you have a different photo for every way you can twitch your eyebrows, and add captions like 'you lookin at me?' and 'im sad..' and 'watcha!' .... among others....
CN : The babes want that man !!
Me : No kidding... So whats the news on that front da ? Ive been hearing some stuff...
etc etc. The conversation went on.
My point here is simple - the internet is a very very powerful tool. Now its almost as though everyone who has access to the internet can establish an indentity for themselves, which is in many ways much larger than they can ever hope to do without the internet. That leads to interesting results motivated by the psyche, as Ive just described.
It would be very interesting to explore exactly how a persons activities online, read against his/her psychological profile ? or maybe someones already done that, I gotta get googling.
