Excerpts from: Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie

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Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie
The American Scholar, Cover story, Spring 2016 James McWilliams, February 29, 2016

"Even as digital distraction promises to alleviate boredom, it removes from the existential equation the founding prerequisite for identity development—the individual, alone, facing nothing."

"When the smartphone transports our consciousness elsewhere, which it does every time we pick it up to avoid the stress of isolation, our most private choices suddenly hew not to the undiscovered ambitions of a curious mind, but to the commercial designs of a data-driven cloud."

"Saving the self in the age of the selfie may require nothing more or less complicated than recovering the lost art of serious reading."