But around your friends, you’re known as the bubbly entertainer. In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman described how any human interaction requires us to perform a certain role.Īt a job interview, for example, you might play the conscientious worker. Of course, people put on a show all the time in real life, too.

And we learned to align ourselves with trendy political causes to demonstrate our virtue to the world. We learned to express either our most relatable or our most extreme opinions. In a world governed by hashtags, comments, and likes, we learned to post only the most flattering selfies. Of course, we all wanted to make sure that only the best parts of our real lives ended up online. While the Web 1.0 was ruled by the idea that you could be anyone you wanted online, the Web 2.0 closely entwined our online lives and our real lives. The key message here is: The internet has turned us all into narcissists – and our narcissism into business. As more and more people started to share their lives online, it became harder to participate in society without having an online presence on centralized platforms such as Myspace– or later, Facebook and Instagram.

With the advent of blogging, people’s online lives started to connect and intermingle. Services like GeoCities allowed users to build personal websites dedicated to golfing, or Ricky Martin, or, in Jia’s case, the TV series Dawson’s Creek.īut then, the Web 2.0 rolled around.

It was more of a loose collection of people’s private obsessions. Actually, back then, the internet wasn’t much of a web at all. That was in the early 2000s, before we all became addicted to the web. “I’m literally addicted to the web,” Jia Tolentino wrote in her online diary at the age of 12.

The trick mirror