It's all about me - narcissism in a high-tech era

But the bigger picture, quite literally, was that every photograph archived on Hilton's T-Mobile Sidekick was of herself: lovable Hilton with Chihuahua Tinkerbell, sexy Hilton mugging on a fashion billboard, half-naked Hilton making out with another woman.

Academics say the heiress's digital shrine is evidence of the narcissism afflicting the Internet generation. From blogging to vanity surfing, technology is helping inflate a new generation of egos of magnitudes never before seen.

Hilton "is symbolic of what society is about," said Steven Miller, who teaches broadcast journalism at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "In the end, people are using (her narcissism) as a mirror on their own lives because they're so fascinated with themselves."

According to a social psychologist at the University of Georgia, heightened emphasis on individualism has led to dramatic increases in the population's self-esteem and, to a lesser extent, cases of clinical narcissism.

"People talk about the 'me generation' and baby boomers, but now it's even worse," said W. Keith Campbell. "When you're with your friends or family, typically your illusions of grandeur are constrained or minimized. But when you have a mechanism like the Web, you can be anything. So all those restraints that keep our egos in check are removed."

Campbell, author of When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself, said technology can empower people to create a self-referential universe. Image-centric gadgets such as camera phones, he noted, have "taken being shallow and made it into a concrete thing."

Similarly, Web logs allow individuals to indulge grandiose fantasies of who they are, cataloging the nuances of their lives - real or imagined - for all to see. News and gossip is obtained from Web sites that conform to their own view of the world, reinforcing the belief their ideologies are the right ones. Vanity surfing (searching for one's own name on the Internet) validates their place in society without requiring them to be social.

"The Internet allows us to replicate ourselves and our words, to play act our favourite roles, to communicate instantly with thousands, to influence others and, in general, to realize some of our narcissistic dreams and tendencies," said Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited. Technology "seeks to render us omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent - in other words, godlike."

Godlike is pretty much the way Saparmurat Niyazov, dictator and "president for life" of Turkmenistan, seems to see himself.

Niyazov's image adorns vodka bottles and is shown constantly in the top right corner on national television. A 10-metre-tall, gold-leaf statue of the president rotates atop a 250-foot base to follow the sun. And he has renamed months of the year after himself, his mother and his latest book.

Publication this month in Italy and the Netherlands of the two-volume Book of Spirit - Ruhnama in Turkmen - are part of an international drive to boost the book's circulation as well as what the government-controlled Turkmen media call a "victorious march around the world" by the author-president, 65, also known in his country as Turkmenbashi the Great.

The book contains Niyazov's moral code as well as his philosophical and historical musings. Its translation into 30 languages and publication outside Turkmenistan have been underwritten by international firms doing business in the natural gas-rich central Asian republic, according to Turkmen media reports, exiled opposition groups and a number of the companies involved.

Human rights groups say the book is at the centre of Niyazov's cult of personality and is ravaging educational and cultural life in his country. Almost everyone in Turkmenistan is compelled to study the book and pass exams about it, and the country's libraries have largely been emptied to leave little but the Ruhnama and Niyazov's collections of poetry.

Washington Post contributed to this report