The Voice of a Generation Yawns

In our media-saturated, surveillance-rich era, everyone expects to always have access to us. We carry an irrefutable audience in our palms and in our heads. The attention won’t go away; playing along has become an economic necessity. Under these conditions, exposing yourself can seem like the best way to disappear. The more pictures of yourself you post, the more contradiction you sow. You hope you can escape into the ambiguity. Bob Dylan confronted these paradoxes of the “attention economy” before the rest of us, most notably on his 1970 album Self Portrait, overhauled and reissued last August by Columbia Records as Another Self Portrait.