The Self in Glass
A discursive composed by Sam (Year 12 Advanced)
Living online is like standing in front of a mirror that never turns off. At first, you use it to check your reflection, but eventually it starts speaking back; suggesting, reshaping and correcting. The mirror makes us think: How much of us is curated? For much of humanity’s existence we have lived free of constant digital surveillance, performance and the emotional repression that feeds off of it. Now, in the digital age of likes, trends and aesthetics, it is evident that social media isn’t just the mirror that reflects us, but the mirror that slowly begins to reshape us. Orwell had Big Brother; but we have become our own.
So, what happens to our sense of self when we step away from being seen, liked, and documented? Can we still feel real when no one is watching? I thought that logging off would be a deep breath, and for a while it was. The first few days felt quiet in a way I hadn’t realised I missed. Without the constant scroll, my thoughts became louder and clearer. There was a time that was real and uninterrupted, a time to just exist without a digital audience. For a moment, it felt like reclaiming a forgotten language. One made of stillness, boredom and unfiltered thought. By the fourth day though, that quiet started to itch. I found myself instinctively reaching for my phone, unlocking it out of habit, only to be met with nothing. The familiar rhythm of tapping and swiping had no purpose anymore. I told myself, “Just once,” as if one glance would ease the discomfort. But there was nothing I needed to see. Only the hollow urge to be connected and to be reminded that I still existed somewhere outside of myself. That’s when I began to wonder: was I really missing the world, or just the version of myself I’d constructed for it? Had my identity become so intertwined with being seen that invisibility felt like erasure?
When we examine the grooves of the human fingerprint, we find literature, wars, art, empires, religions, and institutions; proof of our capacity to dream, love, challenge, and build. And now, that same impulse extends to the world wide web, where figures like Zuckerberg and Gates built the foundations of our shimmering digital reflection. The algorithm watches, remembers and curates. The mirror no longer just reflects, it molds. And slowly, we begin to reshape ourselves to fit its frame.
But what happens when the mirror cracks?
Perhaps we forget. Not all at once, but in fragments. A kind of forgetting quietly takes hold of a phenomenon that has weaved its way through the minds of many young people: digital amnesia. It refers to our growing dependence on devices to store information we used to retain in our minds. Phone numbers, directions, birthdays and even simple memories are offloaded to the cloud and archived in photo libraries and search histories. The more we rely on technology to remember for us, the less likely we are to commit that information to long-term memory.
In other words, we no longer feel the need to remember what we can easily retrieve. But this shift goes beyond simple memory loss. Digital amnesia influences our perception of time itself. When information is so readily accessible, we start to treat the present as a fleeting, ephemeral moment since there is no point in remembering something when it can be revisited with a quick scroll. The act of remembering becomes less a personal journey than a transactional process, where we access what we need and move on, as if everything is temporary, even our own histories.
This forgetting changes us. When every thought can be posted, every moment captured, the private self begins to erode. We become performers of our own existence and the longer we stare into the mirror, the more we risk becoming the reflection instead of the person casting it. Silence doesn’t erase the self; it refines it. Logging off didn’t reveal something raw or untouched, only a quieter version shaped by years of being seen. The mirror, once external, had moved inward. Its gaze lingered in gesture, thought, and instinct. Language began to decay in favour of image; moments were processed as content, not memory. Surveillance has become muscle memory.
Online, this performance finds new costumes. Strawberry Girl and the Coquette aesthetic are not just trends, they are fables. Soft pastels and delicate lace serve as digital folklore, each aesthetic a curated identity in flux. Like the Evil Queen asking her mirror, “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”, we look to the algorithm for reflection, but also instruction. These trends parody themselves, yet they reveal a longing to be shaped by something, to reclaim meaning through play. Beneath the humour is an echo of lost language: a fragmented self, trying to speak.
The mirror never switches off. It stores our gestures, erases our stillness, and reframes even silence as a kind of signal. But within that flicker, between performance and pause, a different self emerges. Not truer, not fairer, but one that exists beyond the metrics. Still fractured, but still here.
