There may be people you haven't spoken to in ages, but you know when they've conquered a new level in Candy Crush Saga or how many miles they crushed in their last run.

We live in an age of auto-sharing, after all.

But is there something more sinister developing when all the world is literally a stage? Could our fascination with self be turning us into unhealthy narcissists?

Chris Barry, associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi, has studied narcissism in adolescents and describes it as a preoccupation with being viewed favorably by others in comparison to others. He distinguished between two types: grandiose and vulnerable.

The former may be more familiar, with celebrities like Donald Trump as a poster child, but the latter seeks affirmation and admiration to support a fragile self-esteem. Barry's research finds higher levels of narcissism in adolescents linked to problems such as anxiety, depression and aggression toward others.

Narcissists may be able to win people over quickly, but they have trouble maintaining long-term relationships, whether with co-workers, friends, family or spouses.

There are consequences to society if we are, indeed, more reliant on constant positive feedback from others. We are likely to end up more lonely and less empathetic.

"Ten or 20 years down the line, we can ask, 'Did social media make us more narcissistic?'" Barry said. Did it become normative, he asked, to be narcissistic or get left behind?

Right now, the jury is out as to the degree to which narcissistic behavior has changed over the years, or which cultural or societal factor may be influencing any such change, he said. But, there's no denying that the advent of social media allows us to witness such behavior with regularity.

"It seems like each generation points to the next as egocentric and self-centered. ... These are developmental issues we've always grappled with, and now we have bigger platforms to display. We're more aware of people doing it."

Unsurprisingly, a study released last month found a connection between how often people post on social networks and their self-reported scores on a scale measuring narcissistic personality traits.

Researchers Elliot Panek, Yioryos Nardis and Sara Konrath conducted research at the University of Michigan looking at Facebook and Twitter use among student and adult samples.

"We found what a lot of people suspected to be true," Panek said. "There's some connection between narcissism and how often people post on social networks."

Perhaps more surprisingly, they measured "frequent" posting as "more than once a day." That's not to suggest that people who post frequently are all narcissists, of course. But social media is a handy tool for those who already have that personality trait.

Facebook is the mirror for adults with higher self-reported narcissism levels, Panek said, while Twitter is an amplified megaphone for students with the highest reported levels. Facebook allows one to maintain an image among established social circles and observe reactions to what is posted, he explained. Twitter is a public broadcast technology, allowing one to share a message with anyone who wants to see it.

"They are certainly great tools for someone to self-aggrandize," Panek said, especially those craving an audience.

Kali Trzesniewski, a social-developmental psychologist at the University of California-Davis, says she has not found any increase in narcissism among adolescents after looking at data sets from the past 30 years.

What's everybody posting on social networks, she asked? People talk about their children, food and trips. This is the new normal of social behavior.

"It's hard to say it's narcissistic when it's normative," Trzesniewski said. "Most people are within a normative boundary."

It's not just a question of whether those on the far end of the bell curve have become more noticeable, but whether the curve itself has shifted.

And perhaps those candy-crushing updates are just a way to give procrastinators of another stripe a way to feel better about themselves.

We know we're being watched.

The question is: Do we really care?

And if we do, what in the world can we realistically do about it? Very few among us can imagine a way to function without a phone or Internet connection. Even if we did, there are millions of surveillance cameras in the United States shooting billions of hours of footage. Couple that with facial recognition software and wave "hello" to Big Brother.

Still, there is a very human desire to keep parts of ourselves and our lives private.

Consider the popularity of Snapchat, a phone app that lets users send pictures and videos that self-destruct within a specified number of seconds. It promotes the user's ability to share "authentic" moments with friends.

"There is value in the ephemeral," the description on Snapchat's website reads. "Great conversations are magical. That's because they are shared, enjoyed, but not saved."

More than 150 million photos are shared through the service each day. The app is wildly popular among tweens and teens, as well as privacy-conscious Wall Street financiers, according to a report in New York magazine.

It may seem like sexting with a virtual condom.

But if we learned anything from the '90s, it's that there's no such thing as fail-safe protection. The same holds true for digital communication.

To get around the "self-destruct" aspect, Snapshot users can take screenshots of images they receive in order to save them. Unsurprisingly, some of those images have been posted online by those willing to betray former friends and lovers. And recent reports revealed that even deleted Snapchat messages can be retrieved by those with enough technical savvy. But for the vast majority of users, the app's suggestion of greater privacy is seductive enough.

There is an explicit assumption with this app, embraced by digital natives, that not every thought, image or action should be displayed and stored forever in a digital universe.

But the notion of privacy is tangled and sticky.

Our comfort level changes with whether it's our parents, our employers (or potential employers) or our government watching us.

When details leaked about the government's massive and sweeping collection of information about ordinary citizens, the public reaction reflected our collective ambivalence about the tension between privacy and security -- at least when there's more at stake than naked selfies.

Since 2007, the National Security Agency has operated PRISM, a secret electronic surveillance program. The massive call-tracking database secretly assembled by the U.S. government sweeps data on nearly every telephone call; online communications are also subject to widespread monitoring. The Patriot Act provisions allowing this sort of surveillance have twice been reauthorized by Congress.

There are those who say this is the price we pay for a stronger sense of security. Plus, those not plotting terrorist attacks have nothing to worry about, right? Individuals' pedestrian communications, whether "secret" to us or not, are not what government spies are seeking.

But the balance of power has swung too far towards corporations and government agencies, and away from ordinary citizens.

Perhaps too many of us have gotten used to the idea that someone we don't want to see our stuff can see our stuff.

This may be changing with the generation from which we least expect it.

I recently took an iPhone picture with my 7-year-old niece and filtered it through Instagram, the photo-sharing application on my phone. I asked her if I could post it on my account. She asked: Who can see it? Can strangers look at it?

I explained that my account is private and limited to only those people I know personally. I didn't get into a complicated explanation of data-sweeping and mining by businesses looking to profit, or governmental agencies looking for needles in haystacks.

This was the sort of lie of omission we tell children.

But her questions themselves mark the beginning of a shift.

The Cheerios commercial that sent shock waves through the media was so controversial that I had to watch it twice to figure out what I was missing.

An adorable little girl is asking her mother about the cereal's heart-healthy benefits. A sleeping dad has a pile of Cheerios on his chest, ostensibly placed there by a daughter who misunderstood the product's cholesterol-clearing mechanism.

Oh, the father in the spot is black, the mother is white, and the daughter looks like a blend of the two. Is it surprising that some took exception to this portrayal and posted hateful rhetoric about it on YouTube?

Part of the Internet's function, in fact, might be as an anonymous release valve for society's disgruntled, dislocated and disturbed. For those who perceive themselves as powerless against the changing tides of culture, economy and demographics, the misspelled, caps-locked ugliness spouted online is their power.

In a most reasonable manner, General Mills asked to disable comments on the YouTube video featuring the spot. This became national news.

The reaction to the reaction was over-the-top. News reports said the spot and the reaction to it sparked a heated conversation about race and forced us to confront attitudes about interracial families.

This plays directly into the aim of the trolls. They want us to think there is something abnormal about a completely normal situation. They want to plant seeds of doubt -- to make us think that we might actually live in a country in which a sizable proportion of the population takes issue with a mixed-race family about as controversial as whole-grain oats.

They want us to believe we live in an America completely different from the one that actually exists.

In fact, mixed-race marriages in America have grown by 28 percent over a decade, according to the 2010 census, from 7 to 10 percent.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans said it "would be fine" with them if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group, according to a 2012 Pew Research study.

We've gone from a country which, in 1986, had just a third of its citizens viewing interracial marriage as acceptable, to one in which more than a third say that a close relative is married to someone of a different race, according to Pew researchers.

The purported controversy over an ad featuring such a family is much ado about nothing.

There will always be those who prefer to date or marry within their race or ethnicity. Unfortunately, there will also always be knuckle-draggers among us, who shout horribly racist comments online. Why amplify their voices?

"Do we really want to hear the hate pour forth from all the whackos on the planet who have access to YouTube, each of them posting 40 kabillion times under different aliases to make their numbers seem larger? No. We get it. You're racist. Let it be your secret," says Los Angeles-based writer Cynthia Liu, who blogs about race, culture, gender and parenting.

"This is a tempest in a cereal bowl, right?" Liu said. In fact, she posits that Cheerios' move could even be an "upside-down, inside-out" way to dog-whistle to open-minded parents who otherwise might not buy the cereal. After all, when General Mills comes out taking a stand against the bigots and standing by their commercial, it's great free publicity for their brand.

The most reasonable explanation for all the attention this has generated has come from the 6-year-old star of the commercial, Grace Colbert, whose mother told MSNBC that her daughter thought all the fuss was over her great smile.

Wisdom from the mouths of babes.