i would wonder if before the age of the internet and forums, we would have to use bbs and irc for communication

i cannot stop thinking about squids today. how are they so cool

why do you recognize yourself in the mirror if you have never actually seen yourself any other way

also is it possible to deform yourself enough so that you would stop recognizing yourself in the mirror or would you always be able to do so

animals don't really recognise themself and any first time you look at a mirror (specifying "any" for post-deformation purposes) you would still be going in with the knowledge that the person looking back at you is supposedly you, so unless you were raised without the knowledge of the concept of a mirror or a reflection in the first place i'm unsure if you could get to that point

you can deform yourself enough to delay recognizing yourself in the mirror. you recognize yourself immediately now because you remember how you look like, but you had to learn how you look like first. humans (and few other animals) can recognize themselves because we can correlate what that other monkey looking at us is doing with what we are doing. the mirror-challenged will always think it's someone else and will often attack mirrors.
i think the ability to see yourself in what is not directly your body is why we are awesome at tool usage and identifying with that set of pixels called a cursor

we're pretty good at intuiting patterns so even before mirrors i think people were able to recognize a) what reflections are and b) that we can see ourselves inside of a reflection, in ie a body of water