This morning’s New York Times article, ‘On the Internet, It’s All About ‘My’‘‘, took me straight to the current world food crisis. Particularly troubling, are the following statistics:
Matthew Zook of ZookNIC, a business that analyzes domain names, said domains that start with “my” more than tripled between 2005 and 2008, to 712,000 from 217,000. According to the government’s Patent and Trademark Office, the number of trademark applications to register marks that include the word “my” increased to 1,943 last year from 382 in 1998.
As a nation it seems to me that we are stuck in toddler, ‘It’s mine’ mode. Our mothers must not have done a very good job at explaining the true meaning of ‘You need to share’. We are a nation suffering from maladaptive narcissism, unable to see beyond our own wants.
Of course, there are some hopeful signs with the popularity of the Obama, ‘Yes We Can‘ campaign, and Al Gore‘s attempts to rally people with ‘We Can Solve It‘. But then, one needs to question the scope of the ‘we’. There is a real arrogance in thinking that ‘we’ the Americans have the solutions, and can decide what’s best for the whole planet.
La Marguerite 
I’m not seeing it as dark as you. I think “my” points at individualism, and I think this can be a key lever in promoting responsibility. What about “my footprint” (you want that to be low), “my contribution” (you want that to be a high, and very visible if you’re narcissistic) , “my values” (you want to have the best you can find, certainly including green).
Also, for the my* domains, I think the “my” part is often referring to a personalized view of a much more complex database, a dashboard of sorts. Those dashboards can help people make much more informed choices.
I think “my” is only bad in “my possessions”. Do you know any more cases?
I’m certainly proud of “my” del.icio.us account. You can be proud of your blog.
I think we’ll just need to accept the human tendency to seek status, and turn it towards the common good. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Also national pride can be a lever. Eventually, it may be that Americans want America to become the greenest nation in the world. I mainly see America as a land of extremes. I see Americans current fixation on consumption and military might as much more fleeing than that.
The NYT article was fine. Nothing surprising – as the article stated – just corporate brands trying to continue to get individuals to express their individuality by becoming clones of everyone around them. Pretty straightforward stuff.
But the SF name/brand manager with his me/we/you/whatever analysis is just straight up ridiculous. It actually made me laugh.
And, your analysis that ‘me’ and ‘my’ is actually different than ‘we’ and whatever is actually some indication of a new narcissism?
That’s just bizarre. Sorry.
Might as well blame space debris for the existence of deep-fried twinkies.
Sometimes an internet marketing story is just an internet marketing story.
What I responded to, and maybe I was not clear enough, is the I/me/my culture that is surrounding us. My things, my space, I, etc . . . are not wrong in themselves, but are symptomatic of a much larger problem. I maintain that we suffer from maladaptive narcissism, and that it is killing us slowly, as well as the rest of the world. We are so wrapped up into our own needs and wants that we are failing to respond to the demands from our less fortunate neighbors. We continue to insist on living in bigger houses, and driving our cars, and consuming like there is no tomorrow. . .
Well, I think there are two ways of looking at it, this issue of “me” as against “we”.
The first is the traditional greeny-lefty sort of way, “the personal is political” or “the individual is connected to the community, your actions affect others.” That works with people of a certain mindset, the sort of people who use words like “holistic”. But for most people, the connection is abstract only. They’re outside our monkeysphere, and that’s that.
I think this is a thing of mindset, the way a person understands the world, because realistically, seeing the connection beween me put a year’s worth of grain into my SUV and some Haitian going hungry – I can’t see it except intellectually, I can’t feel it the way I feel a connection between punching someone in the head and watching him fall over.
The second way of looking at it is a sort of reinvention of traditional morality, that whether they affect the world or not, some things are just wrong – like lying, theft, profaning religious symbols, and so on.
Neither way of looking at it is wrong or right. But the former has plainly failed to convince everyone after the better part of a half-century of environmentalism. So perhaps we could give the second one a try.
I dunno, there must be other ways of looking at it. But those are the only two which occur to me at the moment.
Al Gore spoke at the TED Conference in February, the video of his speech is on the site here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/243
As to Mr. Obama, I’m not hopeful. The fact that he is pro-nuclear speaks volumes about where his priorities are. We must not make the mistake of thinking that the government will take the lead in solving the climate crisis, we must start finding and implementing the solutions ourselves, at the micro level. What we cannot do alone, we can do together.
It is very much about “I” and “we”. It isn’t the pronoun, it’s the ignorance and the value system and that supports it.
The operative words are global crisis. Even though we’ve seen pictures of the earth from space for years, somehow people don’t get it. Blogs like yours are essential. Thank you.
Thank you. I featured Al Gore’s TED video as soon as it came out, two weeks ago.
Regarding Obama, I was referring more to the style of his campaign and the energy behind his movement. If the same force got behind a climate protection effort, great things would happen. But the collective energy has to be there, which it is not at the moment.
As far as needing to act and not wait for outside interventions, I am totally with you. For a while I did place my hope, a lot, in our next president, and in technology, but no longer. I am going back to where I started a year ago. Focusing back onto myself as one element in the system, that I have the power to change. And demanding from myself first, before asking from others.
Marguerite, you said that we suffer from “maladaptive narcissism”, could there also be an “adaptive narcissism”?
What do you think of pride of one’s accomplishments, pride of one’s green lifestyle, etc?
I think it’s just a matter of time before people would feel ashamed to be driving in a SUV. I associate SUVs with obesity.
Absolutely. Two sides of the same coin.
Stimulus, stimulus, now i’m seeing selfish obese driving SUVs. The image compared to Adonis in the buff and Haitians in the rough, from past post, definitely proves your wide theory of lack of vision on the part of a consumerist society. No offense to the those of ill health nor to the ones in real need of larger vehicles.
With open access to information, is emotional blindness a symptom of affluence, or abandonment? Here, i refer to people in the developed world replacing true intimacy with irrational consumerism.
gone the free hugs and backyard fun, back to the insane schedules of modern slavery, for what? For energy hungry gadgets— the better to escape with my dear! i, or should i cap this, “I” welcome the era of a return to saner relations where people stay closer to home and mindfully observe what they spend their lives for.
“We” should be groups, families, friends, and by extension the world. The disconnection with the outer society began when the industrial expansion became too uncomfortable for individuals. Habits hidden amid addictive mechanisms flourished, virtually unnoticed in a frenzy of inventions and promotion. Blame the market — or the buyer..
Arrested mid development the national psyche suffered a displacement surge, ants all over the mobile map, looking for personal satisfaction… upward mobility did not provide that, it only made the race faster and harder.
Finding little comfort, the affection starved grew into humans satisfied by surrogate technology, they conquered nature and bullied poverty into submission, and climate be damned, they will continue to do so, and find politicians who support their point of blindness.
Yes it is possible to consciously choose what we consume, and to be content and at peace. To heal the neurotic patterns imposed upon us by greed and time lines. By example shall we prove.
Yes, we shall! Nadine . . . – actually sounds pretty good! another slogan?