Alan Jacobs


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In a few short years, we have gone from anonymous experts to having all of our most distant acquaintances monitor our guilty pleasures and blind spots. The release of your work playlist isn’t quite the same as topless Facebook photos; and for all I know, there’s nobody out there paying attention to what I play on Spotify. But the extent to which this stream of endless disclosures of what we’re doing, where we’re eating, what we’re listening to exposes, even revels in, the ordinariness of our lives places us far, far from the days of obsessing over what specific music or movies to list in our social media profiles circa 2002. Instead of self-creation cooked up behind the veil, we’re absolutely laid bare without even realizing it. Even as Tumblr and Pinterest turn curation into a commodity, Facebook and Twitter continue to rule the day. We can’t change who we are. Maybe the best we can hope for now is to keep our exposure limited to what it might have been before all this social media junk got started. Not because we’re so interesting or petrifying, but because the endless drivel of the ordinary is never flattering.