You find yourself drunk and alone at the local pub - too nervous to talk to the people around you. You pull out your smartphone. You tap the Facebook app. You update your status: "Party hard!"

A few moments pass. Still drunk, still alone, still nervous, you return to Facebook: "You guys missed out on an awesome time!" with a photo of your drained glass.

Anxiety & Alcohol Predict Facebook Use

Apparently, this scenario is more common than you might think. It turns out that being drunk and scared makes you want to use Facebook more. In fact, anxiety and alcohol use significantly predict usage and "emotional connectedness to Facebook." For college freshmen, anyway.

For his master's thesis, Missouri University doctoral student Russell Clayton surveyed 229 college freshmen students living in dorms. He asked them to rank their perceived levels of loneliness, anxiety, alchohol use and marijuana use, then measured their "connectedness" to Facebook.

Clayton found that students who reported higher levels of anxiousness and alcohol use "appeared to be more emotionally connected with Facebook." What's more, "people who perceive themselves to be anxious (in general) are more likely to want to meet and connect with people online, as opposed to a more social, public setting."

Numerous studies show anxiety is rising in American society, and Facebook - along with its advertisers - could make out like bandits. For example, Clayton's survey revealed that students with a stronger emotional connectedness to Facebook became "more motivated" to drink just by viewing friends' pictures and statuses showing them drinking.

Paging the Bud Light advertising team!

Pot Smokers Love Facebook Less

Oddly enough, this wouldn't work for those selling or advertising marijuana over Facebook - if it were legal. According to the research, marijuana use "predicted the opposite: a lack of emotional connectedness with Facebook." According to Clayton, "Marijuana use was negatively related to emotional connectedness to Facebook and unrelated to Facebook connection strategies. This indicates that the more a participant engages in marijuana use the less emotionally connected they feel toward Facebook."

The reason for the difference? Clayton posits that marijuana usage is "much less of a social process," unlike drinking beer and alcohol.

The study did not examine other social media platforms. Too bad. It would be great to know, for example, if there is a correlation between marijuana use and connectedness to Instagram, for example. Or if people who are generally less prone to anxiety prefer MySpace to Facebook. Do humanities students who drink too much have a Twitter account?  

Study Notes: Participants in Clayton's study had on average between 301-400 Facebook friends. The average time spent on Facebook per day was nearly one hour.

Emotional connectedness was defined as "how emotionally attached students feel toward Facebook." To gauge this, students were asked to rate on a 7-point scale their response to the question "If Facebook shut down, I would be sad."  

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Smoking image courtesy of Flickr.

When does social media become pathological narcissism? Maybe when you broadcast your whole day via a tiny voice-controlled personal-surveillance drone that hovers in the air and follows you around.

A small electronics maker, Always Innovating, says it’s created a palm-sized quadrocopter complete with a video camera, microphone and antenna designed to upload the story of your life directly to social media. The MeCam could be a CIA spybot prototype - but for the fact that it exists only to be ostentatious.

Your Own Private Reality Show Crew

Always Innovating, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, claims to have led the industry in developing portable devices. Indeed, if the company can deliver on its MeCam claims, it would likely have a hit on its hands.

Besides being your own reality-show crew, MeCam allegedly responds to voice commands and will follow you like a good dog, according to the firm’s website. No word on shipping dates. The site is advertising for licensing deals with social-media icons including YouTube.

How the MeCam can do what it does, all for a mall kiosk-friendly $49, is absent from the site. In fact, the only video showing a MeCam flying plays without sound.

There’s nothing technologically exotic about MeCam: voice recognition, semi-autonomous flight and maybe an RFID “leash.”

The big question is “why?”

It’s All About Narcissism

“This is about narcissism,” said Wafaa Bilal, an assistant professor in New York University’s photography and imaging department. “It’s how people on social media operate now.”

Bilal has some experience here, though he would argue that it’s not directly related. For a year between 2010 and 2011, he lived with a webcam implanted in the skin of the back of his head. It might still be there if one of the camera’s four titanium posts hadn’t been rejected by his body.

Bilal insists he was making a statement about surveillance and eroding privacy. Nevertheless, he uploaded 500,000 images, one per minute. The big difference between Bilal’s experiment – and innovations like Google Glass – and the MeCam is that rather than just showing what the owner sees, the narcissist would actually be in the MeCam pictures.

(See also Google Glass: Our Lives Are Not Reality TV.)

Who’s More Narcissistic, The Chicken Or The Egg?

It’s impossible to know if technology is creating narcissists, or narcissist are getting new venues through tech, said Wendy Behary, therapist and author of Disarming the Narcissist.

Regardless, the MeCam seems like the perfect accessory for the special self-absorbed jerk in your life, said Behary. Ground zero for narcissists is seeking attention, broadcasting the miracle that they are and disconnecting from others.

She worried that a MeCam would strongly reinforce that tendency, making it difficult to shake the disorder until life-altering losses like relationships or even careers.

“This does represent a truth, a scary truth,” she said. Narcissists “can continue avoiding relationships and hide” within their own glory, and others could be enticed into narcissism.

I needed a new meditation timer app for my iPhone, and I was not looking forward to browsing for one. The search for "meditation" in the App Store turns up a lot of garbage, and the app I had settled on before still had too much going on. But in the middle of the pack, my eyes fell on Mind, which had a striking, simple design that stood out from the rest.

It was free, so of course I grabbed it, and I was shocked to see how perfect it was for my needs. How could the meditation apps on the store all be so bad except one, and that one happens to be free?

As it turns out, Mind was a simple labor of love with an atypical App Store story. It was built by Fred Oliveira, just @f on Twitter, a full-stack developer and designer. He's also an O'Reilly author and a mentor at 500 Startups. So I had to hear the rest of the Mind story.

"I built Mind mostly for myself," Oliveira says. "I looked around for a timer app (for meditation as well as a Pomodoro Technique tool) that was as simple as it could be. The App Store was packed with apps that looked bad, were poorly designed or were just too complex."

"So since building mobile and Web apps is what I do by trade, I just created my own."

Keep It Simple

Meditation apps are a funny category. App-making is a business. Meditation is a practice of letting go of busyness. These two drives come into conflict surprisingly often.

It's immediately obvious when a meditation app is just about making money; it costs too much for what it is (or it's free and full of distracting ads), and the design shows no care at all. There are plenty of apps in this category.

But even in the apps that are carefully designed, there's often a problem on the opposite extreme. In order to justify charging for such a simple app, many developers feel a need to pack in as many features as they can. These commonly include tons of configurable chime sounds; multiple presets for lengths of time; crazy, changing artwork; and even analytics of your meditation performance over time.

But these features actually detract from meditation apps even more than mere bad design does. The quality of the apps is higher, so it draws people in, but all the bells and whistles — especially the analytics — create pressure to do everything "properly," to make sure you don't miss your daily stats, to fiddle with the chime sounds, and otherwise be distracted from what should be the simplest of all activities.

"Meditation isn't about configuring a bunch of parameters. It's about sitting," Oliveira says. "I didn't need a complex UI, a number of buttons, to help me track how long I sit."

Mind Is A Tool

So Mind is the simplest meditation app it could possibly be, and that's why it works. It has one screen. You swipe the colored time slider left and right to set the duration anywhere between one minute and one hour. Then you hit the button, the app prompts you to relax and focus on your breathing, and when it's done, it chimes three times. It remembers your last session duration for next time. That's all there is to it.

My favorite thing about Mind is that even the imagery is minimal. Meditators come to the practice from different traditions and with different aesthetics, so apps that commit to a particular kind of Buddhist imagery — or worse, some kind of fake pastiche of New Age-y Zen/Hindu/Hippie fusion — are disturbing to me. Mind, from its name to its icon to its full-spectrum colors, is a simple foundation built for anyone.

"I never intended to make money from it," Oliveira says, "which is why it's free today and will probably stay that way forever. It was easy to build, and is easy to maintain. The emails and thanks I get from people who use it are payment enough, to be honest."

"I guess in the last few years I realized I'm a tool maker. Making tools is a calling. Mind is one of those tools. But I've built others before, and will continue building tools in the future. It makes me happy."

Those of us who use Instagram everyday like to think of it in glowing terms. Not only is it a rapidly-growing social media success story, but it's a place where we can go to see gorgeous, often creatively composed imagery. Our friends are there, documenting their world for us and reliably tapping the Like button every time we share our own photos. It's awesome.

That is, until you take a step back and look around

As it turns out, Instagram is a breeding ground for many people's most narcissistic tendencies. It's a reality that comes into sharp focus as soon as you step outside of your circle of friends and look at what everybody else is posting. Turns out that as a group, Instagrammers are a pretty self-absorbed bunch. 

Sure, you might say, we knew this. Mirror-shot, pouty-faced self portraits of teenagers find their way to the "Popular" (now called "Explore") tab as often as sunsets, celebs and food pics. But Instagram narcissism is more than a stereotype. There's actually data to back it up. 

90 Million Selfies... And Counting

Consider this: The third most frequently used hashtag on Instagram is #me. Under it, you'll find more than 90 million self-portraits taken primarily by younger users, very few of them with any irony, or even much creativity. 

Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with publishing self portraits. After all, your appearance is very significant part of the life you're documenting using social services like Instagram. Taken tastefully and periodically, the "selfie" can add personality and context to your never-ending streams of lattes, power lines, cats and skylines. And sure, just like in the real world, our brains love the ego boost we get from the compliments. 

Scrolling through the #me photos, you see images of varying quality, all displaying faces of different people. In a way, it's kind of fascinating to peruse. Here are all these people, broadcasting their own faces to the world. In one photo, you'll see an American kid with his collar popped and earbuds in, probably shirking some school-related responsibility. In the next, there's a Saudi Arabian man dressed in a traditional gutra headdress, snapping a self-portrait in the mirror. Some people have new haircuts. Some have new babies. One guy has several large nuggets of marijuana.  

Some of these images feel a little too intimate. As you scroll through, you start to get the feeling that you're peeking through a window of a world you're not quite supposed to have access to. But mobile and social technology have given us millions of little windows into the worlds of others, so we keep scrolling.

The stream exposes nothing explicit, but it's peppered with what feels like far too many young, teenage girls laying in bed. Or 15-year-old boys standing shirtless in front of a mirror. Some of these kids are showing skin. Just about all of them - male and female alike - are seeking some kind of approval from their peers and the larger community, which thanks to the Internet, is now effectively infinite.

The Rise Of The Narcissistic Social Media Star

Some are getting the approval they're seeking in a big way. Michael Saba is a 15-year-old from Boca Raton, Florida, whose Instagram photos often find their way to the app's Explore tab among teen pop stars, professional athletes and professional photographers. But despite his 45,000 followers and hordes of teenage fans, Saba is not a celebrity. He is, as his Instagram profile says, "just a kid who takes pictures." 

Saba's photo stream is comprised entirely of self-portraits, each one garnering between three and five thousand likes and hundreds of comments, mostly from adoring teenage girls who fawn over Saba with almost Bieber-esque intensity - and shower him in heart-shaped Emojis. The pictures are not particularly interesting or varied. It's just him, in similar-looking outfits, day after day. Sometimes in the mirror, sometimes making well-rehearsed "cute" faces directly into his phone's camera. Quite often, Saba poses with two other friends, also heartthrobs. Every photo is a massive hit. Meanwhile, he follows only one other user. 

In our weird new world, it's not uncommon for young people to achieve this new type of psuedo-fame, fueled solely by social media. And we're not just talking the type of notoriety you can get from a viral YouTube video, which tends to require at least a sliver of talent, humor or skill. Instead, these kids are amassing huge followings just for being attractive. It's like a high school popularity contest on digital steroids, but this homeroom has more than 45,000 kids in it. 

Instagram And Self Image: Is The Impact Good Or Bad? 

Is this necessarily a bad thing? One has to wonder what this kind of existence must do to the ego of a 15-year-old kid. Or the weird new social dynamics it could produce at school. But some psychologists think that the self-image boosts offered by social networks like Instagram could be a good thing. 

It used to be that most of the photographs of other people we encountered were carefully crafted images of the flawless-looking individuals portrayed in popular media and advertising. Psychologists have long had concerns about the distorted effect that's had on normal-looking people's self images. Instagram and mobile photography more generally may be changing that. 

"I like to think that Instagram offers a quiet resistance to the barrage of perfect images that we face each day," writes Sarah J. Gervais in Psychology Today. "Rather than being bombarded with those creations… we can look through our Instagram feed and see images of real people – with beautiful diversity." 

Of course, as Gervais acknowledges, there hasn't yet been much research into what sort of impact Instagram in particular is having on self image or anything else. Indeed, when I reached out to Microsoft's Danah Boyd and several other academics who study social media and its affect on society, I wasn't able to turn up much. 

The psychological impact of technology more generally has been a popular topic for a few years now. Narcissistic personality disorder has been on the rise for 20 years, according to a paper coauthored by Dr. Larry Rosen, who also wrote a book called iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold On Us. 

Some research suggests a correlation between social media and narcissism, but the condition's increase long predates the rise of smartphones, says Jean Twenge, a researcher at San Diego State University who studies issues related to social media.  

"It's probably both that higher narcissism causes people to use social media in narcissistic ways, and that some social media causes higher narcissism," says Twenge. "But it's definitely a two-way street."