Connections- My first connection came forth after I read this quote by Georges Gusdorf, “The very first man who set out to speak and write his name inaugurated a new mode of human presence in the world.”(4) In my mind, I connected that to self-actualization. That’s when humans became aware of themselves as people, and took another bold step after that and gave themselves names, individualized themselves and went on from there. It was a very prominent thing to do and I think this quote is very strong. Another connection I made was a simple text to self one when they spoke about taking outfit of the day pictures or maybe just responding to someone with a captioned gif. I think that’s just another example of the new world, and how everything is changing. My last connection was a text to movie if you will. When the author brought up Cindy Sherman saying that her doing slightly different poses for photographs was not self portraits, but in fact acting in photographs. That reminded me of my favorite movie, Coraline, which was made by using clay models as “actors” and moving them ever so slightly while taking pictures of every small movement, so when you place all the photographs together, it essentially shows a photo by photo movie.

Commentary- In one instance, Rettberg stated, “The data we track is displayed back to us as graphs, maps, progress charts and timelines.”(2) I’m not sure what triggered me to think this, but to put it simply, this made us humans sounds less like humans, and more like objects used to get numbers, or to see how many numbers we can get onto ourselves. Another comment I wanted to make was I found it cool and somewhat surprising that diary style writing came to as a spiritual thing and religious self-examination thing, not just teenage girls talking about boys. Though just now typing this, I have been reminded of Anne Frank. Oops.

Main ideas/ Key points- This article was honestly all over the place, so I struggled to even pin point main ideas but I caught a few. I think one thing the author wants us to realize is that waaaay back when autobiographies started to first come out, the majority of them were by people like priests and nuns, those of whom had at least some education, and were held to a higher standard then the rest of the people. The priests and nuns were able to read and write not a whole lot, but definitely more than the rest of the people, therefore most of the early autobiography type writings were done by priests and nuns. Another key point I sort of got from this was that basically, we track ourselves by numbers. We digitalize ourselves. Our bodies have slightly just turned into vessels, and machines to power up our numbers.