protect ourselves from them at the same time. The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy, she writes. We dont want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in real time.Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. (Look how casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!) Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Australian study Who Uses Facebook? found a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers, the studys authors wrote. In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individuals need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.Rising narcissism isnt so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American respondents were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16 Americans has experienced some symptoms of NPD. And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected: a longitudinal study of Swedish women demonstrated a strong link between levels of narcissism in youth and levels of loneliness in old age. The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.A considerable part of Facebooks appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebooks isolation is a grind. Whats truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekendbut the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its usersand one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook userlog on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do