No, give me my irony, where it’s safe. We know what happens when you
drop the mask for a second. You can fail. You can look foolish. You can
flop. Better to look idiotic on purpose than foolish by accident. As
long as you’re not really trying, you can never fail. Fail, with
everyone watching? Unthinkable. And everyone’s always watching, thanks
to the way we’ve set things up, living our lives half online. With the
Internet, you live and die by your persona. No generation has ever been
so scrutinized in all our interactions — the place where we have casual
conversations with friends is graven into the public record for our
employers. If “know thyself” was on the door to the ancient world (where
was this door, anyway?)* then “curate thyself” hangs over ours. You have
to. If we were meant to put everything out there, unfiltered, all the
time, the Maker wouldn’t have given us an untag button. Never show the
quick, nervous, squishy bits behind the mask. You might get hurt. We
need our masks — what’s a persona, after all, but a mask?
- Alexandra Petri
* γνῶθι σεαυτόν was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. sigh. Don't they read Plato at Harvard anymore? I mean, there was a Latin version of it in the Matrix and everything.
(Yes, I am the person who ruins the movie for everyone else. "But she'd never be able to actually fly the Chinese -- " "Shut up! Shut up!")
descensus Averno facilis est