Looks like Yet More Media Scaremongering to me. It's not as though we exactly lacked egocentrism and vainglory before the Web came around. (Most of us are Xers or older -- who's forgotten the "Me Generation"?)

Besides, the article ignores or downplays the n-way nature of much social software. This stuff isn't pure broadcast the way television is. If you think I'm a self-centered moron, you can go ahead and say so -- if not on my blog, on your own!

Great tie in with this news story, i heard it too, along with another one about the negative effect of "overpraising" kids. I think there's loads of narcisstic twittering in the blogosphere and much of the Web2.0 world sadly reflects the societal apathy around us. But there's just as much use of Web 2.0 in a positive, engaging way (this class, the WorldChanging blog...for starters...) so I think we just keep sifting through the much to find the good stuff...

Shireen Deboo, Librarian

South Seattle Community College

I read this article in our campus paper yesterday afternoon about student narcisism. I found the comments from the Psych instructors rather amusing, mainly because of their different views of the students.

One says: "I've talked with instructors who have been teaching a while," ..."We have mentioned the apparent trend of students feeling higher levels of entitlement for various aspects of the college enterprise." ... "If an instructor doesn't comply with the student's request and they get angry, that anger is coming from a sense of entitlement where a student really believes they are entitled to get that exam even though no one else in the class is," Berneiri said. "The increasing irritation and hostility on students for not being accommodated is increasing."

And the other says: "The students here are pretty cool - I don't see a lot of emotional rises out of them too much. That's probably just the culture of the Northwest."

Wow, where does this link between anger and entitlement come from? Resenting change?

Oh, man. You've just hit one of my pet peeves. I have a rule about not letting people use any variation of "those kids".

I remember being at a library conference (only 3 years ago) where the keynote speaker's main message was that we needed to look out for "kids these days" because they are self obsessed (blogs), law-breaking (copyright), have no attention span (phones), and so on. He had his audience pegged, too. They were chuckling and gasping along about those crazy kids. The moral being that we needed to prepare ourselves because such people are going to be our main users. I was so annoyed that I loudly commented that they are also your coworkers. Yea, because I really feel good about being a librarian when my habits are institutionally mocked.