Vanity And Social Media: Adam Smith Reassures Us That We Are Not All Narcissists

Social media have made it possible for us to display our vanity and court the attention of others at an unprecedented scale. This article engages Adam Smith’s account of vanity to offer a fresh perspective on the online attention economy, focusing primarily on users’ desire for attention and social validation. Vanity, Smith writes in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, is a “folly” of our character, a “foible” we rightly make fun of – in others and ourselves. I argue that Smith’s
account of vanity not only helps us in our efforts to understand trends in online behavior, but also offers us a modicum of hope in a debate that tends to focus on the proven deleterious effects of social media. Vanity derives from (and presupposes) the desire for sympathy and human connection, and recognizing this dynamic allows us to regard much of our online behavior as flowing from our universal desire to love and be loved.