Bouts of Viral Narcissism

Billions of bits of information about individuals float around the Internet every minute of every hour. Whether its Facebook, My Space or just your standard blog, if you don't have a profile on the world wide web you might as well go back to using the telegraph because no one is every going to be able to find you. Before the Internet if you wanted to find out something about someone you would start by looking up their phone number and address in the phone book. Even if you did not know their first name or their location the phone operator would find them for you.
Yesterdays phone books and operators are today's social profiles. Have profiles and the pages that come with them replaced face to face interaction or have they simply enhanced relationships? The answer probably lies in a compromise between the two. Profiles allow us to enter other peoples lives that we wouldn't normally include in ours. It lets us become friends with people without really being their friend. Even with out opening our mouth we can tell people anything and everything that we would normally only admit to when we are drunk. There is only one nasty side effect of a profile, you began to think your actually interesting!
We live in a world where our neighbors are mostly strangers and deep personal connections are saved for the occasional romantic relationship. Our human nature is always searching for emotional touch so in the absence of meaningful conversation we subconsciously attempt to reintegrate ourselves with profiles.
As our profiles sail the sea of cyberspace, bouts of viral narcissism we will surly contract. So go ahead and profess you are a Rocket Scientist, a size 4, rich, single, sexy and 22 years old. We will all believe you because it says so in your profile.