In just over 200 years, humanity has progressed from the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Entitlement. We want everything and we want it now. Delayed gratification now means you have to wait 2 minutes for your free pirated movie to download. We as a society need to be constantly validated, both at the personal and professional level.
I certainly am not immune. Most mornings I log into Facebook and immediately look to the lower right hand corner. That's right. The Red Badge of Narcissism. Surely someone must have been sufficiently amused by some silly comment I made to take the time to reply, validating my wit with a red square. I'm often disappointed when I find out that instead of writing and telling me how funny I am, they've merely clicked the "Like this" button, which is the Facebook equivalent of the IM "LOL," which I would guess is only 1% of the time accompanied by actual audible laughter.
Our online worth is now being measured by how many Twitter followers we have, although again this number is deceiving. I'm still fairly new to Twitter (I did not sign up for a long time soley because of how stupid I think the word "Tweet" is) and I'm learning that some people have a compulsion to follow as many people as they can, likely believing that the person will see that they have a new follower and return the favor - a reciprocal validationary event, as George Carlin would have sarcastically referred to it.
Why is this happening? I'm not sure, although there seem to be a lot of societal forces working in concert. All I know is that I'm going to buy stock in replacement F5 keys.
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