Recent research has begun to turn to this dour fact that a team of British researchers describes as the “extended chilling effect.” The idea here is that people—especially, though not exclusively, young people—now censor and curate their real-world behavior in consideration of their own online networks as well as the larger prospect of the internet masses. The researchers conclude that participation in social media “is profoundly intertwined with the knowledge that information about our offline activities may be communicated online, and that the thought of displeasing ‘imagined audiences’ alters our ‘real-life’ behavior.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1505