HOUSTON — “The Circle,” Dave Eggers’s runaway best seller, is a futuristic nightmare that seems to have touched a nerve. The Circle is a social networking firm with an Edenic campus and a totalitarian grip on its employees’ lives; it forces them to socialize online at a dizzying pace, constantly messaging, friending, liking and answering surveys. In this novel, 21st-century capitalism has gone far beyond “Metropolis” and “Modern Times.” The digital masters turn even personal lives into hard labor, and so all hours are suddenly working hours. Private space disappears as people make themselves “transparent,” recording and posting their lives for thousands, even millions, of “friends.”

In Eggers’s hellish future world, anyone who’s anyone measures her self-worth through the easily quantified markers supplied by social media networks: How many hits, how many thumbs-up, did you get today? Some of us are already living in this world, at least a good part of the time. Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram: The digital tsunami is absorbing, distracting and all-consuming — and increasingly it feels like work. Staying up to the minute is a grind, not a pleasure.

The result of the cool-or-not criteria that social networks urge on us is a flattened, analog version of life. We connect with others by cheering for our favorite things, turning ourselves into simple fans and ignoring the many-leveled, ambivalent selves that we actually are. One of the Circle’s disenchanted employees accuses the company of imposing an eternal adolescent immaturity on everyone: “I like stickers and unicorns” expanded to cover the whole human world. But a list of preferences is not a self, even though the Internet tells us to think of things that way.

The digital world offers us many advantages, but if we yield to that world too completely we may lose the privacy we need to develop a self. Activities that require time and careful attention, like serious reading, are at risk; we read less and skim more as the Internet occupies more of our lives. And there’s a link between selfhood and reading slowly, rather than scanning for quick information, as the Web encourages us to do. Recent work in sociology and psychology suggests that reading books, a private experience, is an important aspect of coming to know who we are.