Generation Bubble

The Rag and Bone Shop of the Self: Social Media and Networked Subjectivity

We outsourced to the people we share with the work of assembling who we are, as they are invited to sort through the data and see only the person they want to see, brushing past the details they deem irrelevant, scanning and responding just as rapidly as one sorts through an interminable list of Facebook updates. As we grow accustomed to sharing everything to everyone as a default, a new and unprecedented kind of public identity will begin to be fashioned for us: the garbage-dump self. We pile up the information about ourselves out in the open for everyone to see, and our followers, like the dustmen in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, scramble about the heap looking for useful bits among the dross.