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A theory introduced to civilization in the form of Socrates, Unwarranted Self-Importance (USI) is the feeling that you are actually worth something despite not having made any contributions to anything at all, thus making yourself look like a complete twat. This is common amongst LiveJournal and Kuro5hin users, chavs, Coalition soldiers who have actually been to Iraq and others prone to arrogance (Kyle Herman, a wannabe pimp, fits nicely into this catagory and should be slapped for his faggotry). It occurs on ED all the time. Unwarranted self-importance is also often associated with flamers or n00bs, Americunts, and The French. It will be found on sites where posts or edits are encouraged, as many imagine themselves working for some greater power as they upset others. It also comes into play when the unwarrantably self-important are lacking in one or more areas of their lives, e.g. being too poor to afford a TV. Most people that reward themselves with the feeling that they are important can easily be considered bastards. People who believe themselves important should seek help, perhaps because of narcissistic tendencies - except for Jacknstock, who was fucking fired instead.

Reasons for Elitism There are multiple reasons someone may think themselves less pathetic than the rest of the human race. Because they (fill in the blank): Are thinner than you. Hate fags more than you. Are more conservative than you. Eat moar placentas than you. Have more artistic talent than you. Are more special than you. Believe in God less than you. Drink more blood than you. Are cooler than you. Have an older religion than you. Know that nobody's perfect and they've got a work it again and again 'till they get it right

Examples of Unwarranted Self-Importance on Wikipedia Basically, most Wikipedians are guilty of unwarranted self-importance. The mildest cases are those who think their edits are actually contributing significantly to an encyclopedia. Jimbo-christened administrators have unwarranted importance, but it may or may not be self-importance, since Jimbo seems to think them important (or more important than other peons Wikipedians). The worst case of unwarranted self-importance are those Wikipedians who have not been Knighted by Jimbo, but pathetically, desperately want to be, like this guy, so they actually start sycophantically acting like administrators,in the hope that their "initiative" will be noted and rewarded. Here is an example of Jaysweet's self-importance:  “  Hi, if you are reading this you saw that I am helping out at the administrator's noticeboard, even though I am not an admin. I believe what I do is useful, and I will continue to do so unless/until an admin asks me to stop. I created the disclaimer after a user became frustrated that he had filed a report and a non-admin had responded. I think I was helpful in that case anyway, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I now often let people know as soon as I answer an ANI report that I am not an admin, especially if I believe the thread will eventually result in admin intervention.

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

By the end of 2004, bloggers were using the ability to add video as an enclosure to an RSS feed, allowing viewers to subscribe to videos and have them delivered automatically to their computers. This solved the problem of click and wait, where you had to wait for a video to start playing when you clicked on it from a web page.

podcasting (both video and audio) is a bottom-up movement and squarely the domain of individuals who are being guided by human creativity and expression, rather than corporate agendas and economic exigencies.

With the cost of video cameras in the hundreds, sophisticated computers with video editing software available for just over a grand, and high speed always-on internet connections costing less than the average cable television subscription, the means of both production and distribution are now in the hands of practically anyone with something to say