"Onscreen, today's torrents of pixels exceed anything Auden could have imagined. Yet the hyper-verbal loneliness he evoked feels peculiarly contemporary. Increasingly, we interweave our actions and our rolling digital accounts of ourselves: curators and narrators of our life stories, with a matching move from internal to external monologue. It's a realm of elaborate shows in which status is hugely significant — and one in which articulacy itself risks turning into a game, with attention and impact (retweets, likes) held up as the supreme virtues of self-expression."

Forgetting the device makes it possible to forget that your online identity does not directly correlate with your physical one. Sure, you still "create" or curate yourself online, but now that the Internet is a visual arena with real-time access, your identity is no longer as amorphous or abstracted from reality as it once was. You represent yourself online using a variety of multimedia material, a complete, sensory, dynamic simulacrum of yourself who cannot instantly change or disappear according to a line of text on the screen. Contemporary mass culture equates anonymity with secrecy or downright negative intent, not harmless experimentation. Who lies about who they are online? Pedophiles, scammers, hackers, bullies, Wikileaks. Anonymity has turned from thrilling to terrifying. 1:1 self-to-body ratio is a moral mandate. It's no wonder that nailing down objective reality seems so attractive.