This is so sad... I cannot even begin to contemplate. When I was young blogging was something exciting and new. You could share your thoughts and interests with complete strangers and make connections to people you didn't even know -- albeit not very deep ones. Never once was it about status or signalling -- I mean surely there were people for whom this was important, but they were playing their status games with each other and didn't bother the people that wouldn't care about such nonsense.

It is a horrifying notion that you are only valued based on the output of your blog / FB / twitter account. I used to think that for every cultural movement there is a counter-movement that tries to invert the values of a previous generation. Are there people in your circle that explicitly reject this notion of self commodification and exhibitionism?