One day I want to expand on the idea that our digital avatars, our images and representations of ourselves, become an extension of our own self-concept, in the same way our keyboard becomes an extension of our hands and our body. Our social media profiles, our timelines, photos, and digital content, become part of our selves, and we begin to identify with these time capsules we've created of ourselves, to the point where we _are_ the person in the photo, we _are_ that person on Facebook.
It's a fundamentally backwards-facing view of the self that relies on historical or past depictions of an individual in order to define their current self-concept. It implies an immutability, a static, unchanging quality to the person, since after all - there "you" are, or at least all your photos and your memorabilia, your self-depictions and simulacra, committed to and preserved in the permanent record of the cloud. It's also one that emphasizes the importance of external markers and signals of identity - only those that can be extraverted - to the detriment of the inner life of the psyche, the private life of the mind which is not so readily available for examination or expression.
This way of looking of ourselves through a digital black mirror continues to uphold the illusion of permanence; our self is like a river, and we never step in the same one twice - unless we freeze the river (in time) and post it to Instagram.
Not to mention all the vanity and superficiality of Photoshop, filters, r/instagramreality, etc etc... points which have all been discussed ad nauseam.
Moreover there is the slow death of the literary personality - of one who, in times where media and bandwidth were not of sufficient capacity to generate and retain all these audiovisual representations of our selves, was primarily known through their words and their writing. This is a fundamentally different way of trying to understand one's character that requires much more participation on the audience's behalf to fill in the gaps - the gaps that can't be immediately filled in with high definition video. It becomes harder for one to be identified through their words, and more and more preferable to identify someone by what they look or sound like; another step in the long, slow march away from literacy and to other forms of information exchange.
In this regard I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace uncut television interview [0], which I found incredibly fascinating - here was one of the most articulate men in society, celebrated for his literary works, appearing awkwardly and shyly on camera, sometimes meandering off on tangents in the discussion, sometimes "pontificating" on the interviewer's questions - how does DFW's audiovisual representation compare to his literary output?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGLzWdT7vGc