But this is where it gets sticky, because as anyone who has ever reached the proverbial “end of the internet” knows, watching people be themselves on their blogs and status updates gets boring, especially as we’re learning that writing after two martinis and a bad breakup can come back to haunt you: Increasingly, we edit ourselves (sometimes we don’t, but most oversharers I’ve known—including myself—have learned to), and the finer the mesh of the web’s net, the more of you it catches and disperses into far-flung corners. The internet is learning newer, better, and faster ways to gain an accurate picture of you, and it’s beginning to more effectively monetize this information. Again: not necessarily an evil thing for an often opinionless tool to be up to, and not necessarily damaging to you, but there should be an alternative to this. The alternative will appear when those of us who create content stop life-casting as singular, identifiable identities, and start dividing like an embryo into plural selves, taking turns with our check-ins, disagreeing with each other politically, creating a virtual privacy sign to place on the doorknobs of our lives.

—tess lynch, who you are and who you say you are.

(Source: tarts)