Take Caution

I'm listening to a professor who teaches on adolescence and girlhood describe what happens to identity in a culture of selfies posted on social media. She argues that once we post something--a picture of ourselves for example--we then become objects to ourselves. We're observing a distanced self, one that we create and manage for an audience.

Split apart like this, we're living a strange and mediated life--one always understood in light of an audience, one always made instead of lived.

Google reported last year that 93 million selfies are taken per day and that we check our phones, collectively, 100 billion times per day.

I wonder what's happening to us. I wonder how to guard against a crafted life, even as I write this blog that I know an audience reads every day.