The Digital Age has
unleashed ‘Ego-la virus’

If vanity was gymnastics, Respectable People would be the Romanians, perennial Olympic gold medalists.

Digital Slobs, however, would not even make it past security to compete, since leotards make us all look like Superman trying to shoplift a 20-pound sack of potatoes out of Safeway.

When it comes to Mirror Mirrors On the Wall, Slobs practice a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. For us, reflective surfaces are merely defensive tools, used only for quick, four-point checks -- teeth (at least a Baker's Dozen, check), stains (undergarments only, check), unibrow (zero to 3-foot visibility, check), boogers (80 percent containment and holding, check).

In fact, unless hangovers convince us our skulls are split in two, Slobs can usually satisfy our limited curiosity about our current rate of decay by putting our computers in sleep mode and checking our reflections in the darkened monitors.

Respectable People, however, use mirrors as offensive weapons, sharpening appearances the way medieval knights prepared swords for battle. For them, the looking glass is a mystical portal, taking them to all the magical places their looks will surely allow them to go. Many are determined to primp until P. Diddy begs them to be in his next video (assuming they can add at least three Zs to their name).

Like throwing gas on a flame, the automated Digital Age has unleashed a plague of narcissism (some have termed it the "Ego-la Virus"). With Web sites like cafepress.com and shutterfly.com, there's now no justifiable reason to buy any consumer item without a photo of your best side plastered on at least one side.

And now, with stamps.com, you can even put your image on legitimate postage. Widespread e-mailing has made the U.S. Postal Service lonely, and it will do almost anything to put us back on the snail-mail trail, even tapping into the "Hey, look what I did!" impulse we thought we outgrew as kids when we stopped showing drawings to grandma.

Of course, even in a free society, parcel post artistic expression has its limits. Stamp submissions are rejected for nudity, political images and celebrities. Ironically, this means that even though your Fat Aunt Edna can now be slapped on an envelope and mailed to all 50 states, Fat Elvis remains forever banned from all USPS correspondence since losing the nationwide vote to Thin Elvis back in 1992.

Still, it doesn't take much demented thought to creep people out with this service. Imagine a stalker with a digital camera and a zoom lens takes a picture of his stalkee, turns it into a stamp, then mails his stalkee a 48-page love manifesto with the stalkee's own picture staring back at her on the envelope like an eerie cherry on top authorized by a metered cancellation mark.

Sounds like the perfect plot device for the next Morgan Freeman/Ashley Judd murder thriller to me.

Not that I endorse the idea. All I'm saying is that if stamps.com was around 25 years ago, there's a certain seventh-grade cheerleader who might have been impressed enough to write a certain other seventh-grade someone back, at least once, even if that certain other someone was a bit chubby and already had the tell-tale signs of a receding hairline -- that's all I'm saying.

Regardless, when it comes to self-reflection, Slobs know a little goes a long way. We should be careful not to give more attention to the book cover of our lives than the book itself, unless we want to risk not seeing the forest for the custom-engraved trees.