"Social media has made the web all about me, me, me"
About this Quote
“Me, me, me” lands like a nursery taunt, and that’s the point: Qualman compresses an entire critique of the internet age into a childish chant. It’s catchy, a little smug, and deliberately repetitive - a rhetorical mirror of the endless scroll where the same impulse keeps resurfacing: look at me, validate me, center me.
Qualman’s intent isn’t to claim people suddenly became narcissists. It’s to argue that platforms industrialized selfhood. Social media didn’t invent ego; it optimized it, turning identity into a feed, a brand, a performance with metrics attached. The subtext is less moral outrage than systems critique: when the web is built to reward attention, the safest bet is to make yourself the product. The “web” shifts from a network of information to a theater of personas, where every post is both expression and bid.
Context matters: Qualman rose with the early-2010s wave of social media optimism curdling into anxiety. As Facebook, Twitter, and later Instagram normalized public self-documentation, the internet’s center of gravity moved from search to share, from pages to profiles. His line captures that pivot with a bluntness designed for keynote slides and airport-business-book clarity.
What makes it work is the accusation hidden in its simplicity: if everything is personalized, nothing is shared. A web organized around “me” doesn’t just inflate the self; it thins out the commons.
Qualman’s intent isn’t to claim people suddenly became narcissists. It’s to argue that platforms industrialized selfhood. Social media didn’t invent ego; it optimized it, turning identity into a feed, a brand, a performance with metrics attached. The subtext is less moral outrage than systems critique: when the web is built to reward attention, the safest bet is to make yourself the product. The “web” shifts from a network of information to a theater of personas, where every post is both expression and bid.
Context matters: Qualman rose with the early-2010s wave of social media optimism curdling into anxiety. As Facebook, Twitter, and later Instagram normalized public self-documentation, the internet’s center of gravity moved from search to share, from pages to profiles. His line captures that pivot with a bluntness designed for keynote slides and airport-business-book clarity.
What makes it work is the accusation hidden in its simplicity: if everything is personalized, nothing is shared. A web organized around “me” doesn’t just inflate the self; it thins out the commons.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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