Now and days our generation doesn’t understand self-representation because we let technologies represent ourselves today. Everything we use in our everyday life like tracking devices and web services are automating our self-representation. The difference between writers from centuries ago and our current writers now is what we were exposed to. Blogs and online diaries are obviously descendant from diaries/ autobiographies in the past few centuries. If you look back when the first era of photography, self-portraits showed more still fragment of the self. Selfies today are different because you are never going to see a selfie exhibited in galleries, but shared on social media. I an relate to this because I currently use social media and you can literally take quick picture of yourself to post on social media. We let social media represent ourselves. Before technology had took over there were other ways to make yourself a better writer like quantitative writing.  For example, a prisoner scratching tally marks on the wall is a form of quantitative diary. Another example is when Benjamin Franklin chose thirteen virtues he wanted to focus on to be a better person and that’s called quantitative self-representation. Quantitative self-representation is similar to pre or post-narrative. A different way to make yourself as a better writer is called lehrstelle. We fill in the gaps that are not explained in the story. The more accounted to reading quantitative representations, we will become even more adapt to interpreting them as stories. If our generation wasn’t so focus with social media than we can actually show self-representation with our actual self.

Main Idea:

The main idea throughout this chapter is about self-representation. There are three different modes of self-representation, which is written, visual, and quantitative. All three different modes had pre-digital history. Blogs and written status updates are descendants from diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies. Selfies today are descendants from visual self-portraits of self. Also, personal maps and activity tracking are descendants from such as accounting, habit tracking, and to-do-list. Each different mode of self-representation has been taken over with digital self-representation. The flaw behind this is that when sharing photos and writing to our friends on social media. We primarily look at social communication we are engaging in, rather than using their and our own self-representation.

Commentary:

A comment I would like to mention is that I really didn’t think how much technologies we use in this century only show digital self-representation and not the actual self. Digital self-representation only represents ourselves by how people prospected it or interpret. As readers today, we encounter social media as text. From our perspective their self-expression is self-representation. In this genera we let technology represent ourselves today.