I Suspect Everyone Else Is Smarter, Better-Looking, Taller, Cooler, Cuter, Has Newer and Shinier Objects than I Do (and Is More Modest)
When you are prone to measuring yourself against others, like I am, and when you both work and live out chunks of your life online, as I do, the Internet can be a bitch. It’s easy to get caught up in measuring your impact online, and to suspect that your own self-worth is tied to it. It’s easy, for example, to measure your popularity and self-esteem in terms of the number of “friends” you have on Facebook, the number of followers on Twitter, the extent of your professional contacts on LinkedIn, your cache of Feedburner subscribers, your Web site’s Google PageRank, tags on Flickr, comments, links, visits, clicks, referrals, Karma on Plurk, and—worst of all!—your Technorati degree of “Authority,” which implies a sort of collected clout and power that, for most of us, doesn’t really exist outside of the unblinking screen that is our dashboard to the world. Those of […]