illusive promise........................................

It seems difficult to imagine, but there was once a time when human beings did not feel the need to share their every waking moment with hundreds of millions, even billions, of complete and utter strangers.  If one went to a shopping mall to purchase an article of clothing, one did not post minute-by-minute details on a social networking site;  and if one made  fool of oneself at a party, one did not leave a photographic record of the sorry episode in a digital scrapbook that would survive all eternity.  But now, in the era of lost inhibition, its seemed no detail of life was too mundane or humiliating to share.  In the online age, it was more important to live out loud than to live with dignity.  Internet followers were more treasured than flesh-and-blood friends, for they held the illusive promise of celebrity, even immortality.  Were Descartes alive today, he might have written:  I tweet, therefore I am.
-Daniel Silva, as excerpted from The Heist