Updated Selfie Quotes

Blog and written status updates are descendents of diaries, memoirs, commonplace books and autobiographies. Selfies are descendants of visual artists’ self-portraits, and the quantitative modes of lifelogs, personal maps, productivity records and activity trackers are descendants of genres such as accounting, habit tracking and to-do lists.

They never delete a thing. It just keeps growing and growing, consuming our lives and turning them into more of itself, an endless stream of inane updates, political rants, selfies, memes . . . And all that dreck’s just gonna stick around, what . . . forever?

Facebook has already appropriated (that is, stolen) other Snapchat ideas, including Quick Updates, Stories, selfie filters, and one-hour messages. The trend will only continue—unless the government gets in the way.