Narcissistic Nation Hooked on Social Media

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One such service offered on smart devices is Twitter which began in March 2006 as a simple way to communicate instantly by using 140 characters. It sounded like a great idea in an emergency. The original tweet sent by Jack Dorsey has now turned into the SMS (short message service) of the Internet with 500 million users. What do Tweeter users tweet about? Pear Analytics of San Antonio classified tweets over a two-week period in 2009 in the U.S. into six categories:

• Pointless babble (40.1%)
• Conversation (37.6%)
• Passing-along info (8.7%)
• Self-promotion (5.9%)
• Spam (3.8%)
• News (3.6%)

The general public uses Twitter to/for:

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• Organize protests called “Twitter Revolutions” (2011 Egyptian revolution, 2010-2011 protests in Tunisia, 2009-2010 Iranian election protests, 2009 Moldova civil unrest, 2011 Arab Spring)
• Civil disobedience and use by rebels in various countries
• Emergency communication (earthquakes, floods, fires, tsunamis)
• Breaking news
• Tracking epidemics
• Automatic response to natural disasters
• As a tool in education to allow better communication at university level
• Public figure narcissistic behavior of both famous and infamous individuals - “the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world”
• Twitter diplomacy (engage with foreign citizens) - 153 of the 193 U.N. countries have government Twitter accounts
• More than twenty Roman Catholic cardinals have active Twitter accounts
• Imitating human communication, twitter robots influence public opinion about culture, products, and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of Tweets
• Social interaction
• Use in television (create the illusion of buzz, sway elections, influence the stock market, public information, and support or attack governments)

The number one complaint in Twitter is that “users are too connected.” I let you decide where that complaint is coming from. The Facebook’s saga goes back to February 4, 2004, at Harvard where it was launched under the name “thefacebook.com” as the idea of Mark Zuckerberg. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss disputed it in court. One thing is sure, it was an instant hit. How is Facebook used?

• Using likes, shares, and memes, people have a false sense of activism, of doing something useful for their country or for their cause
• Sharing of animal videos and photos as entertainment and relaxation
• Communicating daily with real and electronic friends on family, medical problems, politics, morals, cartoons, and religion
• Making prayer chains for self and for known and unknown people going into the hospital or already sick
• Raising money for good causes and for illicit causes
• Publishing essays, advertising books, and advertising sales
• Organizing mass events and parties
• Displaying fake photo-shopped material and spliced videos
• Making political statements and supporting a favorite candidate verbally and financially
• Opinion commentaries
• Using comedians as a source of information
• Lightning speed indoctrination into one’s ideology
• Blotting out the past and cleverly replacing it with cultural Marxism
• Playing computer games
• Revealing very personal traits and characteristics to Facebook and to third parties who gather such information while the Facebook user is told he/she is taking a “fun survey”

One of the main complaints about Facebook is that it has devolved from a strictly social media friendship and family pictures posting platform into a medium in which technology makes drones of people, especially young ones, cleverly using a pastime to turn the population into mass narcissism, would-be Kardashians, and Che Guevara and Karl Marx sycophants. On the positive side, if people can discern the manufactured from the real, Facebook is a source of instant news; news we can no longer get from the main stream media alphabet outlets who promote the ideology and the politics of the elites currently in power in Washington. Many Americans turn to overseas news via Facebook or the Internet in order to get honest reporting. The recent Democrat and Republican debates were a glaring example why Americans no longer trust the media who does not report the news but manufactures it. The debates have been an exercise in futility where Democrats were given fluff questions to make them look exceptionally prepared and honest candidates, while the Republicans received petty and irrelevant questions, were rudely interrupted by the so-called moderators with an agenda who spoke over the candidates, inveigled them to attack each other, and did nothing to advance the candidates’ experience, the issues plaguing our economy, and the problems with our corrupt political system. Sen. Ted Cruz pointed out “The contrast of the Democrat debate, where every fawning question from the media was, ‘Which of you is more handsome and wise?’” The liberal media create false narratives parading as news, speak in contradiction to what we see, experience, and hear, a cognitive dissonance that affects the decision-making processes of many - it is a form of brainwashing. Leon Festinger said about his 1950 cognitive dissonance theory: “If you change a person’s behavior, his thoughts and feelings will change to minimize the dissonance.” Keeping in harmony people’s behavior, attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings is important because they are interconnected. Forcing a change in one, will cause change in others. If you change beliefs, you can change behavior. If you force a behavior to change, thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs will also change. A classic example of such brainwashing was employed by communists on prisoners during the Korean War. If they did not say what they were told, prisoners got nothing to eat. The brainwashing recitation included:

• Communism is wonderful.
• America is terrible.
• America only benefits the rich, while the poor blacks die for them in foreign places like Korea.
• Communism is the wave of the future and the most enlightened form of government.

“After enough repetition, some of the prisoners started to really believe it. Some even defected, and refused repatriation at the end of the war.” No matter what the purpose or how we use Facebook or Twitter, we have become a dangerously narcissistic nation addicted to social media.

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