This 2009 post from Dave Winer is good. “It’s so incredibly complicated. Mostly because there are so many observers all in one body.”
And it brings to mind two things:
- Czeslaw Milosz’s Ars Poetica:
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
- A quote from Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of the Self in Ordinary Life. Under the subheading “Reality and Contrivance”(emphasis added):
It does take a deep skill, long training, and psychological capacity to become a good stage actor. But this fact should not blind us to another one: that almost anyone can quickly learn a script well enough to give a charitable audience some sense of realness in what is being contrived before them. And it seems this is so because ordinary social intercourse is itself put together as a scene is put together, by the exchange of dramatically inflated actions, counteractions, and terminating replies. Scripts even in the hands of unpracticed players can come to life because life itself is a dramatically enacted thing. All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.