How far do you walk in an average day?

Most of us in the seminary are wearing fluorescent green electronic devices clipped to our belts. You might think they were tagging devices, but we find it easier and cheaper to track seminarians by hacking into their mobile phone signals. (Joke! I can imagine some crazy person reading this post too quickly and saying to a friend, ‘Did you know they tag the students at Allen Hall?!’).

In fact, we have splashed out on a job lot of pedometers. We are divided into teams of five, and the aim is to see which team can ‘walk to Rome’ first. I’ve just looked this journey up on Google Maps, and it comes out as 1,089 miles and 356 hours on foot.

This is a much classier version than the ones we have

 

It’s not communal virtue. It’s self-improvement. Trying to get the activity levels slightly higher, to improve our all-round health and well-being, and giving us the time-honoured incentive of a competition to urge us on.

I know this sounds daft, but in the first two days I walked three miles without going anywhere. What I mean is that I spent the whole time in the building here; and the only time I went out was to give a talk in a parish in west London, and I drove there. So without going anywhere, without walking along a street, I clocked up three miles – just going back and forwards from office to dining room to chapel to photocopier etc. It’s not a big house, and it shows how far you can walk just going about your ordinary business.

I did about ten miles in the first few days. Then…disaster struck. Coming out of the chapel, and straightening myself out after Mass, I caught the blasted pedometer with my right hand, it crashed to the floor, AND IT RE-SET ITSELF TO ZERO!! Ten miles down the drain; ten miles for nothing. I rushed to the college ‘Walking to Rome’ arbitrator, and she said she would give me the benefit of the doubt and add these on at the end. But I understand that now everyone is talking about their pedometers crashing and re-setting, when they had 50, 100, 200, 500 miles on them…

It has made me curious about how much I do walk, and walking in general; and I suppose that’s half the point. I chatted to a friend today and she said that when the pedometer craze broke over the UK years ago (we are very behind here), it was suggested that 10,000 steps was a healthy and realistic distance to aim at each day if you are trying to take this walking thing seriously. That’s about 5 miles.

You can tell I am getting pulled in, because now I want to buy a decent pedometer to replace the unreliable one I’ve got. I’ll try to remember to update you. I’m sure you are fascinated by my personal step-count. Maybe I could do a weekly post about this…

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Facebook and narcissism: how many times a week do you post, update your profile, change your picture, tag yourself in photos, share, like, respond, self-disclose, react, provoke, and generally attempt to put yourself at the centre of the social networking universe?

Those of you who are not on Facebook can ignore this post and luxuriate in your non-dysfunctional psychological maturity and in your general being-at-ease-with-yourself-and-your-neighbour-and-your-world-ness.

For the rest of us, the hard question is: how often do we fiddle around on our Facebook page, not through an uncomplicated desire to share and communicate, but because we are subconsciously desperate to put ourselves at the centre of everyone else’s attention, to receive some kind of social networking version of approval, to be liked, and if not at least to be noticed?

Put more simply: is Facebook making us more narcissistic? Or – because we don’t know what is the cause and what is the effect – is our increasing narcissism finding a ready-made outlet in Facebook and other forms of social media?

Narcissus falling in love with his own image. Detail from a painting by John Waterhouse.

Damien Pearse writes about some recent research on the links between narcissism and social networking.

Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a “socially disruptive” narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media sceptics.

People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.

The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.

The latest study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also found that narcissists responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site’s public walls and changed their profile pictures more often.

Researchers concentrated on the two socially disruptive forms of narcissism: ‘grandiose exhibitionism’ (self-absorption, vanity, superiority, exhibitionistic tendencies, a need to be constantly at the centre of attention), and ‘entitlement/exploitativeness’ (which includes “a sense of deserving respect and a willingness to manipulate and take advantage of others”).

Carol Craig, a social scientist and chief executive of the Centre for Confidence and Well-being, said young people in Britain were becoming increasingly narcissistic and Facebook provided a platform for the disorder.

“The way that children are being educated is focussing more and more on the importance of self esteem – on how you are seen in the eyes of others. This method of teaching has been imported from the US and is ‘all about me’.

“Facebook provides a platform for people to self-promote by changing profile pictures and showing how many hundreds of friends you have. I know of some who have more than 1,000.”

Dr Viv Vignoles, senior lecturer in social psychology at Sussex University, said there was “clear evidence” from studies in America that college students were becoming increasingly narcissistic.

But he added: “Whether the same is true of non-college students or of young people in other countries, such as the UK, remains an open question, as far as I know.

“Without understanding the causes underlying the historical change in US college students, we do not know whether these causes are factors that are relatively specific to American culture, such as the political focus on increasing self-esteem in the late 80s and early 90s or whether they are factors that are more general, for example new technologies such as mobile phones and Facebook.”

What is cause and what is effect?

Vignoles said the correlational nature of the latest study meant it was difficult to be certain whether individual differences in narcissism led to certain patterns of Facebook behaviour, whether patterns of Facebook behaviour led to individual differences in narcissism, or a bit of both.

But don’t worry – it’s not all negative. This is just one study, and the researchers are not denying that there are real benefits of social networking.

Christopher Carpenter, who ran the study, said: “In general, the ‘dark side’ of Facebook requires more research in order to better understand Facebook’s socially beneficial and harmful aspects in order to enhance the former and curtail the latter.

“If Facebook is to be a place where people go to repair their damaged ego and seek social support, it is vitally important to discover the potentially negative communication one might find on Facebook and the kinds of people likely to engage in them. Ideally, people will engage in pro-social Facebooking rather than anti-social me-booking.”

I suppose the most narcissistic response to this article would be to terminate your Facebook account in a blaze of online soul-searching and self-publicity, a final fire-storm of frantic pre-termination reflections, posts, de-tagging and emotional farewells. But that leaves you with a problem: what will you do to feed the narcissism tomorrow?

(And do you notice how silent I am on the links between Facebook narcissism and blogging narcissism! Perhaps that needs another post…)

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