Yesterday morning, while hunting through the Today Show archives for a piece they did early this week on personal branding, I came across an interesting article titled, Me, me, me! America's ‘Narcissism Epidemic'. Psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell have recently authored the book The Narcissism Epidemic. The article included a segment from the book as well as an interview with Ms. Twenge.
The segment from the book explained that we live in a culture that promotes narcissism which will ultimately lead to "aggression, materialism and shallow values." The authors hold that narcissism is rampant in our society and include a variety of examples, including,"People buy expensive homes with loans far beyond their ability to pay - or at least they did until the mortgage market collapsed as a result...People strive to create a "personal brand" (also called "self-branding"), packaging themselves like a product to be sold...High school students pummel classmates and then seek attention for their violence by posting YouTube videos of the beatings."
So if I understand this correctly, my site, Karen-Rubin.com, which I started to promote my personal brand is the same as if I went out and recorded myself "pummeling" a colleague and then posting that on YouTube? Really?
The excerpt then goes on to further explain,
"Although these seem like a random collection of current trends, all are rooted in a single underlying shift in the American psychology: the relentless rise of narcissism in our culture...Standards have shifted, sucking otherwise humble people into the vortex of granite countertops, tricked-out MySpace pages, and plastic surgery."
While I have never succumbed to plastic surgery or MySpace, I do have granite countertops in my brand new kitchen and what can only be described as a "tricked-out" Facebook page. (I mean it has photos and an RSS feed from my blog, that must be what tricked-out means, right?) Since both my Facebook page and my granite countertops have come since I started working at HubSpot, I have to assume I was a "humble person" until Mike Volpe taught me about the dark dark world of personal branding and social media.
What I find even more fantastic about all of this is that Ms. Twenge has her very own personal branding website! So does that mean personal branding is ok if you are an author going on the Today Show and it's just for the rest of us "humble people" that it's a narcissistic activity?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this one. Are all of us social media busy bodies just narcissists dragging the country down into shallow values? Or are Ms. Twenge and Mr. Campbell correct that these activities can do no good?
