Identity in the Digital Age

The smartphone turned self-portraiture into an everyday practice for billions rather than a specialized artistic skill. The result is an unprecedented archive of human self-documentation that dwarfs everything earlier centuries produced.

That scale raises real questions about the link between self-image and identity. A profile built from selected, filtered selfies is, in the end, a strategic act of self-presentation — the Renaissance habit of shaping how you are seen, now scaled up to a universal social behavior.