Those who go looking for evidence of increasing self-absorption seem to find it everywhere these days. Inflated egos are apparently smiling in the selfies people snap, self-obsession woven into their compulsive online sharing. Even the tiniest language choices are revealing. First-person pronouns like "I" and "me" are crowding out "we" and "our" in all kinds of communication — from advertising copy to academic writing to newspaper articles to song lyrics.
The shift, some academics warn, is proof of narcissism run amok. It's popular to blame millennials, of course.
In one high-profile study, researchers from the University of Kentucky used a text-analysis program to interpret the lyrics of the top 100 most popular U.S. songs — as ranked by the Billboard Hot 100 — each year between 1980 and 2007. They found a steady uptick in first-person singular pronouns (I, me) and a decline in more communal first-person plural pronouns (we, our), according to their 2011 paper in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. All this singing about me, they concluded, showed the larger culture was becoming more self-centered and less socially connected. "Narcissism is like a flu," said W. Read more...
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from MashableThe Atlantic
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