People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted

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We turn into each other’s audience, judging from afar. We become each other’s data harvesters, knowing who went where, at when and with whom. We even become each other’s digital oppressors: we form a limited perception of who we think someone is based on what they post, and when they do something that doesn’t conform to the imposed image of them,... See more

We live in a culture of watchers and appearers, of watchers and approvers , a culture where it feels distinctively hard to be a real human being. It’s like some sort of Orwellian nightmare, but worse, since we are being watched, but we have also employed ourselves as the watchers, as big brother, looking in at a projected image of everyone’s life,... See more