> People change. The fact that your entire life's story, your narrative, is also forever preserved in the archives of the net, also lends credence to the illus

> People change. The fact that your entire life's story, your narrative, is also forever preserved in the archives of the net, also lends credence to the illusion of a permanent, unchanging, fixed and immutable self. People don't change. They can't change. It's impossible to act "out of character," because if you act in a manner that is opposed to how you have been depicted, represented on social media in the past, people will say, "oh, that's not the real you!" and reject all your attempts at self transformation, reminding you of who you were, where you've been, what you were wearing in that group photo last Friday... It's fundamentally changing our concept of self, ossifying it in our digital fossil record. It's impossible to introduce a discontinuity into the thread of your life's story when the cameras are rolling 24/7. The cognitive fluency of being able to access thousands of self-representations, facsimiles of who you are, makes it easier to identify with the selfie on the screen. Easier to identify with the profile picture or the avatar. Easier to become locked into the constraints you imposed on yourself when you decided to freeze a snapshot of your person and preserve it in a digital time capsule. Easier to fall prey to the delusion that the self is permanent and immutable. You never step in the same river twice. It just looks like the same river when we take a picture of it and frame it on our wall.