Is our great contemporary fear anonymity?
If the property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmodernism is it visibility? So asked the writer of a thought-provoking article on our obsession with connectivity.
Is this what our contemporary selves really want? To be recognised, to be connected, to be visible, if not to the millions via, say, the X Factor, then at least to the hundreds, via Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn?
And in the process, perhaps we are losing the ability to know ourselves in quietness, in isolation, to dip into what Thoreau called fishing "in the Walden Pond of our own natures".
This is food for thought indeed: uncomfortable and provocative, because it's quite possibly spot-on in its diagnosis.
