“The final and possibly most psychologically destructive, distortion of the social internet is its distortion of scale. This is not an accident but an essential design feature: social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you.” SelfInternetSocial Media Book:Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion Source: Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
“People often make faces, in private, in front of bathroom mirrors, to convince themselves of their own attractiveness. The ‘lively belief that an unseen audience is present,’ Goffman writes, can have a significant effect.” SelfIdentityInternet Book:Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion Source: Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
“As with the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, the curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I'd guess, was around 2012. 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 complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedome promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.” SelfInternet Book:Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion Source: Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion