The Culture of Narcissism in the Postmodern Society
The Culture of Narcissism in the Postmodern Society

Summary/Abstract: Narcissism could be described as a phenomenon that has been “residing” in the sociocultural environment for centuries. With a natural technical-technological progress, this phenomenon has steadily transformed itself into a new form of reality typical for the contemporary postmodern society – the media reality. And it is the modern type of media reality, the so-called virtual environment, which prefers activities (creating personal accounts on social networks with an aim to communicate, or create avatars in digital games, and others) leading to advertising the ideal “I” and is, thus, an impulse to the rise of narcissistic tendencies of media products users. The main objective of the paper is to map the phenomenon of narcissism in the media environment, mainly on social networks. For this purpose, we use primarily logical-conceptual methods of text analysis; the issue of the presence of narcissistic culture in virtual reality becoming a subject of a discourse analysis. The objective of the study is to define the basic conceptual apparatus, or the terms “culture” (mass and popular culture separately), “postmodern society”, “narcissism”, and “social networks”. However, special attention is paid to the heterogeneous expressions of narcissism among the virtual environment users.

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