Tech­nol­ogy writer Nicholas Carr reflects on how what we share online imi­tates our per­sona much more than we imag­ine.

Your online self […] is entirely self-created, and because it deter­mines your iden­tity and social stand­ing in an inter­net com­mu­nity, each deci­sion you make about how you por­tray your­self — about which facts (or false­hoods) to reveal, which pho­tos to upload, which peo­ple “to friend,” which bands or movies or books to list as favorites, which words to put in a blog — is fraught, sub­tly or not, with a kind of exis­ten­tial dan­ger. And you are entirely respon­si­ble for the con­se­quences as you nav­i­gate that dan­ger. You are, after all, your avatar’s par­ents; there’s no one else to blame. So leav­ing the real world to par­tic­i­pate in an online com­mu­nity — or a vir­tual world like Sec­ond Life — doesn’t relieve the anx­i­ety of self-consciousness; it mag­ni­fies it. You become more, not less, exposed.

Carr notes that “in the Web 2.0 world we talk inti­mately, or at least famil­iarly, not just with peo­ple we actu­ally know but with com­plete strangers” and comes to the con­clu­sion that no mat­ter how imper­sonal our online ‘shar­ings’ (blog posts, tweets, etc.), the aggre­gate ends up being “the foun­da­tion of a scary-deep self-portrait”—but a self-portrait of who is the ques­tion that is left unanswered.