"I quickly mastered the Twitterati’s unnatural self-consciousness: processing my experience instantaneously, packaging life as I lived it."

"I learned to be “on” all the time, whether standing behind that woman at the supermarket who sneaked three extra items into the express check-out lane (you know who you are) or despairing over human rights abuses against women in Guatemala."

"Distilling my personality provided surprising focus, making me feel stripped to my essence."

"It forced me, for instance, to pinpoint the dominant feeling as I sat outside with my daughter listening to E.B. White."

"Yet the final decision (“Listening to E.B. White’s ‘Trumpet of the Swan’ with Daisy. Slow and sweet.”) was not really about my own impressions: it was about how I imagined — and wanted — others to react to them."

"How much, I began to wonder, was I shaping my Twitter feed, and how much was Twitter shaping me?"

"Back in the 1950s, the sociologist Erving Goffman famously argued that all of life is performance"

"Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self."

"The expansion of our digital universe — Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter — has shifted not only how we spend our time but also how we construct identity."

"Among young people especially she found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion."

"“On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,”"

"“But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.”"

"The fun of Twitter and, I suspect, its draw for millions of people, is its infinite potential for connection, as well as its opportunity for self-expression."

"But when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy?"

"The risk of the performance culture, of the packaged self, is that it erodes the very relationships it purports to create, and alienates us from our own humanity."