"Evidence for the rise in narcissism continues to come up in research and news. A study by psychologist Dr. Nathan DeWall and his team found “a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music” since the 1980s. Shawn Bergman, an assistant professor of organizational psychology at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina notes that “narcissism levels among millennials are higher than previous generations.” Researchers at Western Illinois University measured two socially disruptive aspects of narcissistic personalities — grandiose exhibitionism and entitlement/exploitativeness. Those who had high scores on grandiose exhibitionism tended to amass more friends on Facebook. Buffardi and Campbell found a high correlation between Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) scores and Facebook activity. Researchers were able to identify those with high NPI scores by studying their Facebook pages."

"Being bored turned out to be, well, sort of pleasant. Some of the bored moments are actually pretty sweet, like being at the playground with my younger son. If you don’t have kids of your own, the honest truth is that hanging out at the playground can get super boring, and I don’t begrudge anyone checking their phone. But sometimes I’m glad I can’t, because I can just watch him dink around in the sand, or I can stare off into space… it’s kind of nice. And riding on the bus or the train, I don’t have anything to read, so I just get to stare at the other passengers. Fascinating! It’s also the only time I get to listen to music without trying to do something else at the same time, which is pretty enjoyable."

"Les réseaux, outils de l’instant, vecteurs du concentré, nous lient aux autres sans nous lier. Ils nous abreuvent de ragots parfois drôles, et parfois même utiles. Formidables instruments d’autopromotion, ils encombrent notre quotidien plus qu’autre chose. Nous y sommes addictés. Un seul instant nous ne pourrions vivre sans eux. Quel succès, n’est-ce pas, que d’avoir atteint les 5000 amis sur Facebook? Je vous assure, ce sont des amis, vraiment des amis. Des amis poids-plume. Ils sont “safe”, nous n’avons pas à les rencontrer, à boire un café, à leur parler de nos soucis, à écouter patiemment le récit des leurs. Ils sont tous là, sur l’écran, tard dans la nuit, tôt le matin. Vous éteignez l’écran, et ils ne sont plus là. Ils nous protègent de la solitude… mais nous laissent seuls. Liés à eux par l’image, la meilleure qu’ils aient d’eux-mêmes, la meilleure que nous donnions de nous, et par quelques mots, ici et là, cliqués à la légère. “J’aime”, mot si doux sur Facebook… Mais aimer sans s’investir, sans échanger, aimer sans s’aimer, est-ce de l’amour? Oui, oui, c’est de l’amour de pacotille, mais de l’amour quand même. Dire que même l’amour a changé… J’aime mais je suis libre. J’aime sans toucher, ni sentir, et sans voir vraiment."

"Sure, there’s a social networking aspect to it, but Google Plus is really Google’s version of Google. It’s the groundwork for a level of search quality difficult to fathom based on what we know today. It’s also the Borg-like hive-queen that connects all the other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Images, Offers, Books, and more. And Google is starting to roll these products all up into a big ball of awesome user experience by way of Google Plus, and that snowball is starting to pick up speed and mass."

"Whether it’s a hipster statement, like not owning a TV, or an attempt at privacy in the allegedly post-privacy age, people without Facebook accounts are definitely in the minority. What do you think when you meet someone (in real life, presumably) who doesn’t have one? Do they tend to be holier-than-thou? Weird? Secretive? Or just totally normal folks who don’t dig Facebook for one reason or another? Do you think there’s a stigma?"

"First, it turns out there are segments of Facebook power users who contribute much more content than the typical user. Most Facebook users are moderately active over a one-month time period, so highly active power users skew the average. Second, these power users constitute about 20%-30% of Facebook users, but the striking thing is that there are different power users depending on the activity in question. One group of power users dominates friending activity. Another dominates ‘liking’ activity. And yet another dominates photo tagging."

"The Internet isn’t some obscure thing that only a few thousand people use for a couple hours a day at the most. This is the Internet that everyone connects to, and if you sent some embarrassing pics of yourself to public, it’s your own damn fault. (…) Deleting out of anger after the fact won’t get rid of anything. There is archiving of almost everything that is online. Almost none of it goes away after archival. The best thing you could do is to delete and hope that after a year or two, it’ll be forgotten. There might be an archive of that pic you posted of yourself dry humping someone other than your spouse, but who’d check all the archives, right?"

"I spend less time on my computer without Facebook’s source of infinite content. During real life experiences, what is or isn’t worth sharing on Facebook no longer lingers in the back of my mind, so I spend more time simply enjoying the present. And the false comparisons between others’ curated digital self-presentations and my own naturally widespread sources of pride, fulfillment, dissatisfaction and insecurity no longer exist."