Behind the Scenes at the Zoo

In case you missed it, there was a recently published research article that found that Celebrities are more narcissitic than the average person. Now, I'd submit that the sampling methodology for selecting the celebrities is biased, but this is hardly the kind of thing that you'd think would need serious research.

But at the same time, I do wonder whether the same standard applies to bloggers.  It's been my observation that many (though certainly not all) bloggers - at least the "personal" as opposed to "corporate" bloggers - do tend to evidence some amount of the attributes that were supposedly tracked in the survey: superiority, exhibitionism, entitlement, vanity, authority, and exploitativeness.  And, like the media, who often are accused of enjoying most talking about... the media, many bloggers spend a lot of time talking about blogging as an institution (I guess with this post I've also become guilty of this).

I suppose what I'm wondering is whether or not blogging is creating a new form of instant celebrity - one that can spread with lightning speed and can disappear just as quickly.  Perhaps Warhol's 15 minutes of fame has been supplanted by the web's 15 million clickthrus of fame.

And to my 3 regular readers, don't worry, I'll return to dry technical topics soon enough; this was just a diversion along the way. :-)

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• #1 Comment from stujenerin 
  9/21/06 9:15 AM | Permalink

  ..."this was just a diversion along the way"...
  
  A nice one though.  
  
  I tend to suspect there's a strong generational component to the popularity of personal blogs as well, because very few of the folks my age find the details of their personal lives compelling enough to share with the entire globe, yet most of the 20somethings and teens I know blog about every tiny detail of their life.