It’s all about me!

One thing that you discover very early on when self-publishing an e-book is that it’s much like self-publishing an album: you spend a great deal of time writing/talking about yourself. You soon discover that you are nowhere near as pale and interesting as you thought you were, and start looking for other things to do (even work!) to distract you from the tedious world of yourself.

This must be a real problem for genuinely famous people who have to answer the same inane questions from interviewers on radio, television, websites and so on, over and over again in a relentless series. Bob Dylan obviously tired of it early in his career and was infamous (in Australia at least) for being extremely hostile to reporters and giving one-word answers or no answer at all.

Narcissism is all around these days, a quick glance at Facebook demonstrates that, which makes me wonder who is consuming all of this stuff? Everywhere we look we’re invited to ‘share’ what we’re doing on some social media site or other, and according to this graphic from the Socially Aware Blog at least, people in America are apparently spending around ten hours per month on social networking sites, almost half the time they spend socialising with real people.

My generalised experience of Facebook is that a lot of people I know not that well are telling me things about the minutiae of their lives which are so utterly unremarkable that they wouldn’t mention them in direct conversation. It smacks of self-promotion and ooops…