by Christine Cavalier
on 21 May 2008
This week: Narcissism
It’s been a long day. After carting the kids around town on errands, you hope to do a quick return at the department store. You are about to pull into a prime parking space when you are cut off by a man in a Mercedes. You finally get into the store and are standing in line for 15 minutes when the same man cuts in front of you in line. This is Mr. N. You protest to Mr. N, firmly, but he ignores you. Trailing behind Mr. N is a frazzled store clerk, pleading with him that he is going in the wrong direction. Mr. N loudly insists that the customer service return desk is where he needs to be. Mr. N acts like his is the King of the Store. In fact, he is so utterly rude that you wonder if he isn’t a regional manager of some sort. Upon listening to his totally random and unrelated request, you realize Mr. N is not a manager of anything. In fact, he’s just a self-centered jerk. You have no choice but to sit and wait for Mr. N to leave.
Mr. N has what Sigmund Freud termed “Narcissism.” Based on the mythology character Narcissus who was said to fall in love with his own reflection, Freud characterized narcissism by extreme conceit and self-centered behavior. Narcissists also relentlessly seek admiration and are prone to a dramatics.
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by Christine Cavalier
on 19 May 2008
Twitter (or any other social networking site) will fail if they refuse to enforce their TOS.
An article in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer about the school district provided me with an excellent metaphor for how Twitter’s lack of maturity can set back the entire realm of social media by about 5 to 10 years.
Here’s the lowdown of what is happening in the Philadelphia School District: They don’t discipline. They had 5,000 incidents last year that would be considered crimes outside the school, some felony level, but 2006 is the last year they expelled anyone. The district seems to have an unwritten policy to never police its schools, contrary to the written “Terms of Service” (TOS), known in schools as ‘the discipline code’. The small minority of violent students, never punished nor expelled for their crimes, make the entire school system unusable for the law abiding majority.
If you have a big city with unsafe schools, what happens?
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by Christine Cavalier
on 14 May 2008
With Chris Hambly of AudioCourses.com here.
by Christine Cavalier
on 5 May 2008
Perhaps it is the anonymous nature of internet interaction that allows people to spew egomaniacal and nasty vitriol. After all, the spewers never have to look their victim in the eye, sit in the same meeting, or go to the same church. A virtual community is cannot yet wield as much power with social norms that a real life one can. The immature among us take advantage of this.
On May 2nd, 2008, after being hit by such “trolls” on Twitter, I posed a question about ‘humility’ as a virtue. Below is a photoshopped version of the Twitter conversation that followed. (The timeline is slightly out of chronology, due to time zone differences and the reordering of my responses to be in proximity to the relevant Tweets.)
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