I have a confession to make. I am an anomaly for my generation.

To elucidate… If I am being honest, I don’t see the point of Twitter (News - Alert) for personal use and the way it encourages individuals to post inane things about their life every hour – about what cereal they ate for breakfast, how work is – for a lack of a better word – “sucking today,” and about what they thought of “The Bachelor” last night. Can’t I just text my friend about last night’s episode to relay my hatred of Courtney?

And I don’t get the obsession with Facebook. Sure I have fun browsing my friends’ profiles to see who they are dating and where they are now employed, but I certainly do not get the point of Foursquare (News - Alert), status updates and tagging others in posts. At the risk of offending all my friends right now, why do I care that you are currently at Starbucks? And why tag (News - Alert) the five friends that you are at dinner with to make those on the “b” list of your group of friends feel left out?

To put it simply – I don’t get the narcissism that seems to pervade society today. I don’t get why others think that people care about their every thought, sentiment and belief.

I am not alone in this, though. Anyone in Gen Y can certainly attest to the fact that we are often bombarded by questions from our parents, grandparents, employers and people in other generations such as: “Why does your generation tweet like there is no tomorrow?,” “What is with this Facebook (News - Alert) obsession?,” and “Why can’t you sit through a dinner with me without your phone on the table cloth?” Many of us feel we have to defend ourselves and justify our behavior by saying that millions of others do it to. But I actually don’t really have an answer to those questions, because I don’t use technology in that fashion.

But then I read “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk, a book that shows you how Gary spent the better part of his life piggybacking off of the social media revolution to grow his family wine business from $4 million to $60 million in five years. Simply put, he “crushed it.” While Gary’s book focuses predominately on how social media can turn any business venture into the next big thing, he also sheds light on why these sites work at the end of the day. And the answer, believe it or not, is that whether people want to admit it, they have voyeuristic tendencies (and no I don’t mean sexual).

Rather they want to be able to glean into someone else’s life, in an invisible way. They want answers to questions they would never ask out loud such as “Does my friend Rachel really love her boyfriend?” Need the answer? Check her status mentions about him. What about the question “Do my frat buddies still hang out with each other even though I haven’t heard from them in months?” Check to see who they are tagging during their nights out at the bar.

While we won’t say it out loud, we all want to be a voyeur at some point or another. And on the flip side, we are all subconsciously feeding others’ voyeuristic tendencies which is affirmed every time someone “likes” our status updates or “re-tweets” our tweet.

Perhaps it is not narcissism that leads many to do the things they do on social networking sites. Conversely, maybe they are the ones who are smart enough to know that there is a market out there to share their every thought and idea because people want to ask those questions, they just don’t. 

So to all my tweeting aficionados and Facebook status obsessed friends out there, I offer you a slight apology for calling you narcissistic. I still think you are a little (insert smiley face), but maybe there is more to the picture. And, in the spirit of narcissism, follow me on Twitter so that you can hear every one of my thoughts https://twitter.com/#!/CarrieSchmelkin!