She also writes about deeply personal experiences, including growing up as a Filipina in Texas, attending and breaking away from an evangelical megachurch, experimenting with drugs, and playing a version of herself on a reality TV show. Tolentino’s book is not just about the internet. This process, the book asserts, inevitably involves some deception of self and others. But unlike analyses that regard users as passive playthings in the hands of tech overlords, Tolentino portrays them as eager participants in the funhouse that is social media who use its tools to curate their image to project socioeconomic success - often with the hope of ensuring it. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Jia Tolentino’s debut collection of essays, also meditates on the role of social media, and the internet more broadly, in shaping identity, public discourse, and political engagement, particularly of millennials like herself. Singer suggest that if social media is a mirror, then “ the mirror is distorted - or rather, that it distorts us.” Many public intellectuals have commented on the danger, even weaponization, of social media personalization, pointing to violations of privacy and intellectual isolation. Platform personalization keeps us engaged and, more importantly, receptive to advertisements. We know that our online experiences, from Google searches to social media timelines, are tailored to our interests, locations, and activity history. IN 2005, Mark Zuckerberg described Facebook as “ a mirror of what existed in real life.” In the aftermath of Pizzagate and Cambridge Analytica, the notion that social media simply reflects reality is laughable.

The trick mirror