Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.
Interpretation
The quote reflects how social media alters our perception of life, making it seem more exciting and under our control.
Jonathan Franzen's quote highlights the artificiality created by social media platforms like Facebook. It suggests that our experiences gain an alluring quality when viewed through a digital lens, leading us to curate our lives for public consumption. In this process, we become the protagonists of a fabricated narrative, where constant self-documentation and the feedback loop of likes and comments mask the reality of our everyday existence, thus giving us a false sense of mastery over our lives.
In practice
When giving a speech about the influence of technology on identity, I could use this quote to emphasize how social media shapes our lives.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
A breakthrough in machine learning would be worth ten Microsofts.
Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.
A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly'... Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words 'user-friendly' on the cover.
What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we're going to reinvent the phone.
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