"[T]aking social photos changes the way vision works—a process that began with the advent of cameras and is still evolving today. Teen-agers are cyborgs..."

"... and their phones are mechanical eyes that help them interpret their experience. 'To document,' Jurgenson writes, 'is to be involved with our own experience instead of passively letting it float by.' On this subject, Jurgenson has all the right, if somewhat dutiful, opinions: nostalgia is overrated, but he’s not into 'digital austerity.' We shouldn’t hark back to an era in which we were less attached to technology—mostly because that era doesn’t exist. 'Our reality has always been already mediated, augmented, documented,' he writes, 'and there’s no access to some state of unmediated purity.'.... For him, the risk of constant documentation is alienation: a sense that our bodies are generating still moments rather than constant movement. He cites Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German scholar who wrote about the effect of the railway on human perception. With its speed and glass windows, 'the train flattens nature into something smooth and predictable, not something traveled within but something easily seen and consumed,' Jurgenson writes. 'As more of life is experienced through camera screens, does it occur at a similar remove, where the messiness of lived experience is made into something merely observable?'"

From "How Social Media Shapes Our Identity/The Internet constantly confronts us with evidence of our past. Are we losing the chance to remake ourselves?" by Nausicaa Renner (in The New Yorker). "Jurgenson" is Nathan Jurgenson, author of "The Social Photo/On Photography and Social Media."