Mutual admiration society
by Bob on October 24, 2007
"Mas" could mean "more" in Spanish. It could be an acronym, too. We choose it to mean a Mutual Admiration Society.
And that seems to be what a lot of comments and communications on social interaction networks are about. Faux mutual admiration. For, if we dig deeper into the e-relationship, we find very little true feeling at all. Unless the two e-people really know each other as people in real life.
So, many netizens of the e-village spend a lot of time sending comments which say things like "I love you" or "You're the best" or some other seemingly romantic emotional syllogism, but again, it is usually devoid of true and lasting sentiment.
This is a description of an emotional desert, an emotional landscape where the human depth is very shallow and has the attention span of a channel surfer with a remote control clicker in front of a 200 channel TV. About ten seconds per channel watched at one time. Little attention paid and no depth.
So, as the Woody Allen 1997 movie "Everyone Says I Love You" portends, everyone in the e-village says "I love you" but very few have a basis for it or in fact really mean it.
So we lapse into mutual narcissism, with an underlying foundation of pure narcissism. We just share it.
There has got to be a better way.