None of this is entirely new. Photography is nearly two hundred years old. But what is new is how cheap, easy, and fast it is to capture an image of myself and project it to the entire world via a “profile” that explicitly represents me. There was only so much self-expression you could convey when a photograph required you to hold perfectly still for fifteen minutes. But today the possibilities are endless, and nearly effortless. The average preteen in America has the same basic tools for publicity that only the biggest Hollywood stars had sixty years ago. Where the paparazzi or celebrity
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