Posted on Wednesday, 10 November 2010
When self-esteem is no longer linked to hard work and achievement, it’s not a good thing.
A good reason for this […] is the exploding number of vehicles our culture provides to promote feelings of entitlement and habits of self-regard.
We have an entertainment industry that promotes the Kardashians as much as it does Meryl Streep, which disentangles success from talent and suggests we are all potential celebrities. We have all manner of personal broadcasting systems at our disposal—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube—which lead us to believe that whatever we have to say has value, whether it does or doesn’t, and make all our opinions heard at once.
We have customized entertainment (my.nbc, my.nytimes, my.yahoo), which makes us see the world as a child does, a place that curves to fit our needs and desires and opinions; the Internet has become less a portal into other worlds than a mirror of our own, or what Nicholas Negroponte at the M.I.T. Media Lab famously calls ‘The Daily Me.’
