Last year, I had a strange dream. My father and I were walking through a canal with difficulty as thousands of fish were released around us. In the dream, I knew that the fish thought they were drowning, as if they had to face death before becoming adults. The next day, my father told me that when I was three, he had taken me to see fish being put into a pond. I could not remember it, but the vision had stayed in my mind. Memories, like images, can return years later in unexpected ways.

    Today, it is common to see old images suddenly appear online. We spend hours looking at photos that record our daily lives in ways never seen before. For young people under twenty-five, who have grown up with social media, childhood is no longer private or mysterious. According to Kate Eichhorn, a media historian at the New School, this constant exposure is sure to affect how identity develops, although we are not yet sure exactly how.

    Eichhorn explains that there are two sides. On the positive side, children and teenagers have more control than before. In the past, adults were the ones who decided how childhood should be remembered, using books, photo albums, or home videos. Today, young people can create and share their own images without depending on adults. This gives them the power to tell their own stories and decide what to remember about their lives.

    On the negative side, social media can make it difficult to leave the past behind. We are not the only ones posting—our friends and families also share moments of our lives, often without asking us. This makes it hard to forget mistakes or change identities. Eichhorn warns that the danger now is not that childhood disappears, but that it might never end, because the past is always visible online.

    It would, indeed, be surprising if we could see painful memories as finished and gone. But most difficult experiences are not captured on screens. Social media shows only part of life, often the happy or triumphant side, and leaves out the tears and struggles. What remains online is rarely the full truth, but fragments that stay with us, shaping how we remember ourselves.

Nausicaa Renner. How Social Media Shapes Our Identity.

Internet:<www.newyorker.com>  (adapted).