The Psych Student

If all celebrities are really just narcassists what does that say about the rest of us who pore over the tabloid stories about them?

Back in days of old I remember watching Love Lines on MTV with Dr. Drew and Adam Carolla. Teens used to call in with sex and/or drug questions, Adam would use them as comic fodder for ridicule and then Dr. Drew would kick in with some sage pop-psych advice in the course of a few minutes. Did it help these kids? Who the heck knows. But it was good watching to keep up with the the state of teen angst. That was a long time ago. I sort of thought Dr. Drew’s 15 minutes were up.

Not so, as it turns out. According to this story at Wired, Pinsky is back with a new book which asserts that:

1) Most all celebrities are suffer from narcissistic personality disorders even before they becomefamous;
2) Hollywood, the press and basically you and I encourage them to become even more mentally unbalanced by the attention we collectively heap on them;
3) All this irresponsible behavior becomes normalized in society and replicated by other budding narcissists who post similar drunken, drugged or sexed-up antics on their Youtube videos and Bebo profiles.

When I say that Dr. Drew “is back,” I guess I show my lack of being in touch with the latest in U.S. reality TV, since according to the article he hasn’t really been on sabbatical from the public eye. He maintains a radio call-in show and was host of something called Celebrity Rehab, which seems like apropos research for this subject matter.

You can probably see where I’m going with that, but let’s get back to it in a minute. In the Wired piece (haven’t read the book) Pinsky makes a few very good points that could be taken further. Not so much about Hollywood royalty, but the rest of us.

According to Wired, Pinsky’s new book, The Mirror Effect is based around research he and co-author Mark Young carried out in 2006, Pinsky and his co-author Mark Young published the first systematic study of celebrity psychology in the Journal of Research in Personality. “The new book explains that research and how it fits into the larger context of our culture, which they argue has been soiled by shameless producers, agents and paparazzi,” the article says.

As a psych student (soon to be as of this post, I guess) and a digital media professional who runs campaigns using several social network websites, there was a lot to ponder in this, though.

First, are social networks inherently mentally unhealthy? At the top of this blog you see a whole string of so-called “narcissistic twaddle¹ .” And those aren’t the half of it.

I have profiles at gigs of these sites, most of them I seldom go back to after joining. Part of my prolific joining habit has to do with professional curiosity: I want to see how they work, if their is anything I can do for work at them, what the user experience is like; what the underlying technology might be, and so forth. Some of them I use ust because they’re actually an enjoyable excursion. Whenever I remember that I signed up for Last.fm, I plug in some headphones and can listen to people’s playlists for hours, discovering a lot of decent music because I’m matched with people with similar taste. Through Couch Surfing I met some really great people from Morocco through Guatemala, all who sort of have a similar relaxed but adventurous streak that I enjoy in people. And Facebook is that clearing house site. Activists and causeheads organize with it, you can find events and actual news there, but I think we all know we spend far more time their taking useless quizzes than actually organizing anything.

But reasons aside, these combined with the other sites I actually do use that share mundane things about what I do, plus my personal blog, CV blog and this one, what do they add up to?

Psychologists over the years have tried to dissect our understanding of The Self in various ways over the last century. We have our self image, our private insecure image of ourselves. We have our own image of ourself based on how we think others perceive us, and we have the different social masks we don to exude what we think will make us more accepted based on the situation we’re in. Lots of selves to cover.

To those, I think we need to add the online persona, an emerging and sometimes over enlarged piece of our identity, existing external to ourselves and both within and outside our control: Every time you Twitter something, get tagged in some photo on Flickr, change your Facebook status, bookmark something in Delicious, post something on your blog or comment on someone else’s blog, or have your Hot Or Not ratings go up or down, your online persona is taking shape. It alters how people see you and how you see yourself.

Twitter is a supreme example of the enlarged online profile. It’s just people constantly telling one another what they’re doing or thinking at any given moment, no internal editor necessary. And actually, the 140-character limit and the layout — and endless stream of quips that yours will soon be lost amid — promotes one to say things off the cuff. Your internal monologue now has a media outlet.

Pinsky might agree more with Bill Maher’s sentiments² on Twitter: “I’m displaying the very self-absorption that will destroy us all.”

For a counterpoint, Stephen Fry³ today Twittered a Twitter manifesto: “We are twitterers. We can take satire from those who don’t get it. We are strong. Do we have lives? Hell, yes. More than enough to share.”

Fry is a celebrity and arguably his publicist may be telling him that Twittering 50 times a day is good for his career. What’s everyone else’s excuse? Why are we expanding our online personas so far?

It seems that Pinsky and Young lay blame at the feet of our sordid, modern celebrity culture. Again, I’ve just seen the article and not the book so I’m sure the argument has been boiled down some for speedier consumption. Pinsky goes into the urge/compulsion/reinforcement cycle to explain a lot of what’s going on here. People see celebrities acting nuts, they long to be such people, they mimic the activity and upon getting attention for it, repeat the process.

But who is he referring to as a celeb? Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O of Jackass fame are one example. but a lot of the article looks at the reality TV phenomenon.

“In their 2006 study, Pinsky and Young found that celebrities from reality television score the highest on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Pinsky is convinced that the producers of those shows carefully select contestants with psychological problems, because they will bring extra drama to each show.⁴”

But who are these people and what does “celebrity” mean in the age of Youtube and Big Brother? Self aggrandizement has always been with us. Narcissism expressed at obscene levels may now be 2.0 easier, but it isn’t a new OS in human behavior. Blogs are the descendent of ‘zine culture. Social networks the natural progression of online chat rooms and forums. Lord Byron first recognized the traits needed for celebrity status and allowed for the unfettered duplication of his likeness in portraits that were cheaply available to the general public. ⁵

Byron making his likeness readily available helped spread his public profile as an artist and adventurer and helped sell his poetry. Likely he was a narcissist before his first word was published, but one can’t help and see the business angle as well. Stephen Fry twitters like some Tourette’s sufferers swear, but the constant exposure that results can only help his status as a pop-culture zeitgiest.

When Pinsky and young talk about reality TV celebrities, though, we’re looking more at case studies that would involve the likes of Jade Goody and an avalanche of people whose names no longer register with anyone. People in shows like Survivor, Big Brother and scads of copy-cat reality shows. People famous only for being on these shows.

Byron may have carved a career out of being famous, but at the root was some talent for the written word. Fry has more Twitter followers than TV viewers, but there’s still a trained comedian at the heart of his work. These are people who became famous because they were/are good at something. Jade Goody is (was) famous for acting like a racist on Big Brother and then getting cancer and having every detail of her demise put on TV or in the daily tabloids⁶.

When Andy Warhol once opined that one day everybyody would be famous for 15 minutes, a lot of people celebrated the quote and repeated it endlessly. But what if it was more of a dire diagnosis? No one asked if he thought it was a good thing.

What do we now mean by “celebrity” when we use throw word around? Reality TV shows are glorified game shows. Why do we celebrate their cast? Contestants on Jeopardy weren’t ever referred to as celebrities. And consider the body of knowledge you’d have to know to be on Jeopardy as opposed to Big Brother.

What if instead we look at the decline of talent, intelligence or skill as prerequisite of celebrity status? What does it mean to people when we say that you no longer have to excel at something to be lifted up and rewarded by society at large? And what if we took another step back and looked a burgeoning Western culture of entitlement? Is it now spreading to unfettered attention and ego grooming?⁷ Are we now entitled to our 15 minutes of fame?

“We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionairs, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t, and we’re slowly learning that fact, and we’re very very pissed off.” — Fight Club (film version)

Today you are famous for being famous⁸. Getting on TV warrants you endless coverage for how you got on TV. And getting back to Dr. Drew, we can see this illustrated even by the simple task of judging his book by the cover. Or, perhaps it would be better to judge what his publishers will think will sell by the cover. The research behind the book, the content itself is by two authors: Drew Pinsky and Mark Young. Yet Pinsky’s name is in type rivaling the title font while his co-author is buried beneath. And from looking at the cover, we don’t get any idea of what Mr. Young looks like. We do have ample opportunities to see the guy who is and does play a doctor on TV, though.

Is Pinsky himself a narcissist or does it appear that way because he has a talented agent? Would a person have an agent if they weren’t a narcissist?

When he (and Young, his lesser named co-author) talk about the urge-compulsion-reinforcement cycle that episodes of Jackass encourages in some people who replicate thier masochistic deeds in YouTube clips, it needs to be thought of in light of social scripts. Psychologists used to worry about the depiction of violence on TV and how it would effect kids’ behavior ⁹ Portrayals of positive results by cool people exhibiting negative traits could, studies suggested, alter what was perceived as normal by impressionable viewers, and thus social scripts change. The kids start being little Chuck Norrises and Dirty Harrys.

I’ve always been a fan of fictional TV and film, myself. It’s escapism. It’s insight into popular culture aspirations and fears, and it’s usually so much better than what passes for entertainment in the Reality TV business. Consider this: Intelligent people writing the words for attractive people to say. No, it doesn’t happen in real life. That’s why it’s an escape. Reality TV isn’t an escape, it’s a bombardment of the inane.

But even with this genre, blaming TV, film, the press, “The Media” is a bit of a dodge because it implies that The Media operates somehow separate and outside of society as opposed to where it really is: at its center. Media is produced by society.

We also need to realize that media isn’t produced in a vacuum without other social pressures going on simultaneously. As we’re encouraged to be more open and put ourselves online in social networks, shopping sites and video clips so that websites can wrap advertisements around our antics, privacy is vanishing. The same video technology we choose to aim at ourselves on occasion is aimed at us whether we want it or not when we leave our homes. Thousands of CCTV cameras are aimed at people in London on every street and in every train and tube station, on every bus, in city parks, in most every shop they enter. The same is true in cities around the world.

How does this impact on the private self? the private self is the meditative self. The self that reflects, recriminates and goes over all that we do in a typical day. Aiming cameras at the extraordinary is no longer the norm. Capturing every moment of the norm is the norm. How does it effect behavior and where does the outlet in which we can just be ourselves go?

All that research into social scripts may need to either be heavily revised or thrown out entirely. People are now taught that a lack of talent, skills or basic intelligence can actually be rewarded. Meanwhile, we live in a world under the camera. And if there is no realm left for the private self anyway, what is left but the narcissist?