Well, perhaps we don’t know
that story, but we understand the context. So much of modern life is conducted on and mediated through the internet, constant electronic communication, and social media. In a way that would have been unthinkable barely a decade ago, we now have ready access to highly addictive and potentially immense platforms, providing a serious incentive to perform a personality online. This personality can be fun or dour, earnest or cynical, politically radical or smugly apolitical. Yet no matter what it is, this personality doesn’t quite reflect who we are offline. For some of us, our internet selves are more confident, more outgoing, blasting the powerful on Twitter or sharing carefully cultivated collections of smiling pictures on Instagram, even as we brood at home in quarantine. For others, our internet selves are wholly fake, artifices meant to generate clicks, and thus attention, and thus money.