On the Internet and Magic Mirrors

Dear jaden violet and Cami Gram, I have been reading your exchange and it reminded me of a story, Andersen’s The Snow Queen. As you both know, I might have a bit of an obsession with magic mirrors, and I feel certain the Internet, but most particularly social media, is a magic mirror. Here is snippet of one of my favorite stories. Make of it what you will. Love, Meg

“One day this demon was in a high state of delight because he had invented a mirror with this peculiarity: that every good and pretty thing reflected in it shrank away to almost nothing. On the other hand, every bad and good-for-nothing thing stood out and looked its worst. …

“All the pupils in the demon school — for he kept a school — reported that a miracle had taken place: now for the first time, they said, it was possible to see what the world and mankind were really like. They ran about everywhere with the mirror, till at last there was not a country or a person which had not been seen in this distorting mirror. …

“At last it slipped out of their hands and fell to earth, shivered into hundreds of millions and billions of bits. Even then it did more harm than ever. Some of these bits were not as big as a grain of sand, and these flew all over the world, getting into people’s eyes. Once in, they stuck there and distorted everything they looked at, or made them see everything that was amiss. Each tiniest grain of glass kept the the same power as that possessed by the whole mirror. Some people even got a bit of the glass into their hearts, …”