The thing about being a little black girl in the world who is already, at nine years old, confident enough to demand that lazy, disrespectful reporters call you by your name, is that most people will not understand the amount of comfort in one’s own skin it takes to do that, will not be able to grasp the sheer fierceness of it, the boldness, the certainty, the love for yourself, and will not be blown away at seeing you do it, though they should be.​

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that your right to be a child, to be small and innocent and protected, will be ignored and you will be seen as a tiny adult, a tiny black adult, and as such will be susceptible to all the offenses that people two and three and four times your age are expected to endure.

But take heart.​

A man’s chief loyalty must be to the woman who has joined her life to his; to the children who call him father; and to the business which feeds and clothes and houses them all. In my easy-going willingness to befriend the world at large, I was sacrificing my wife, my children, and my employer far more than I was sacrificing myself. As I look back, I marvel that my wife and the children should have borne with me as uncomplainingly as they did.

What was true of my family was true of the business as well. I thought I was being friendly to the customers of the house. As a matter of fact, I was too often being friendly to the customers at the expense of the house. It is a common fault in salesmen. They let a thousand trivial demands on the part of the men to whom they sell take their time and energy from the business of the men for whom they sell.

I don’t really use Facebook, but when I do, it’s all about my private life and old friends. I never really talk about work, ideas or interests, it’s truly social, but in a strange, awkward, historic way… it’s like looking at a life I once lived or a path I didn’t take. For people I went to school with, it must be impossible to workout what I’m like now. In this way, I’m socially closed off… distant… standing in the corner, not talking to anyone, during a school reunion .

Twitter is more about ideas and interests, it’s my true place… (although I do go through moments of panic because I realise I’m a bit sweary and negative) – it represents me more as a professional. I think it gives a truer representation of how/who I am.

The looking glass was now a mirror; instead of reinventing us, the web simply provided more of us to the world, and more ways to take advantage of the world around us. We speak of Yelping and checking in on 4Square as if these were activities, when they are simply the day-to-day cataloguing of our lives—or, even worse, a grimly detached version of modern life in which we aspire to be ourselves. Mediation presents itself as a friendly tool when in fact it creates distance between us and the ordinary.

An excess of candor remains a problem—the digital equivalent of a nip-slip or drunken voicemail—yet these cases are more accidental than confessional. Secret identities and alternate lives have been ferreted out, turned into a professional liability. When they persist, they are (hopefully temporary) refuges created out of need—like the online homes made by teens who don’t fit in in their real-life homes. These internet lives are real life by proxy, not a shadowy, distorted version that is never intended to be realized.