modern tech + the self those late-night doom scrolls into the interface abyss. that "needing to record everything" feeling. posting that one picture, not the other one.
all of these acts and feelings a common in the digital world-affecting-the-real-world phenomenon that a lot of us, if we have the privilege to have access to mobile technology, have experienced at one point or another. we design ourselves on our phones through profile pictures, comments, statuses, stories. some of which can seem permanent. where do they go if we delete them? the cloud? what even is the cloud? why do we feel such a sense of urgency and automacy when unlocking our phones? we are living our lives ourselves, but are we? some of us have digitalized everything about our lives to the point of it affecting our psychological health and wellbeing. the world has become to live in extremes. in a time without social media (which is hard or even impossible to remember for some of us) or when technology was scarce, actual social engagement when we were growing up is what helped us form our selfidentities: friendships, opportunities like getting good grades, what we do for fun, the communities we're apart of. media is everywhere now and especially for our younger generations (Gen Z, anyone?). these are constant, overwhelming outside influences on our 'internal' sense of self. we Google one word and get billions of results in seconds. checking our email spam folder is just exhausting. there's not one way of cooking that recipe, there's 240,000. and let's be real, we don't want to sit there and comb through all of the information because it's information overload, so we use strategies and ways of finding the fastest results that are the most convenient to us, like our good ol' friend Siri. it seems as though media used to be more human-
"media used to reflect us." -centered. it is clear that in many parts of the world especially here in the U.S., media used to reflect us. now, media paints pictures of who we should be. scratch that — of who it thinks we should be. what's accepted, what's attractive, what's popular, what we should buy into either figuratively or literally. the social media and other digital algorithms (more on page #) are a huge factor in telling us who we ought to be. the advertisements we receive, the recommendations on where to go, what to buy to make ourselves look a certain way, the concepts of pop culture that we should be so connected to each and every day. in other words, our sense of self used to be ours, but now, it might even be a refleciton
