6 Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray

Were we to reinvent Dorian Gray for the twenty-first century, the young cad about town would now have as many ways to strut his stuff in the virtual world as in the real. Gray might now invite his friends to upload their artistic impressions of him to Pinterest, though as he would also surely delight in the possibilities of the digital self-portrait to shape his own aesthetic image on Instagram and Flickr. Lacking any need or desire to work for a living, Gray would most likely favor Facebook over LinkedIn and view Twitter as a perfect outlet for his bon mots and put-downs. In Gray's manicured hands, each tweet would likely serve as the linguistic equivalent of a selfie, a knowing online pose to convey one's attitude to the world and, especially, one's social circle. In fact, because what we tweet and whom we follow can be so very revealing about our inner selves, a burglar who came upon Gray's hidden “soul” portrait in the attic could scarcely learn more about the man's true personality than any of his followers on Twitter. Our online personality is now as measurable as our carbon footprint and is as much a function of what we unthinkingly discard as what we lovingly flaunt.