The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything

by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

“A thought-provoking analysis on what exactly we’re doing with all our many hours of screen time.” — Harper’s Bazaar

An eye-opening look at how social media shapes the stories we tell and the lives we lead

Over the past two decades, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have revolutionized how we document and share our lives. We once archived our experiences in photo albums, and now we capture our most significant moments in reels and photo dumps. Whether we prefer to admit it or not, social media is where our history lives now.

In The Story of Your Life, journalist and New York magazine columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton examines how these algorithm-driven platforms not only change the way we share information but also shape the content itself. What stories do we choose to tell, and how do these choices reflect and shape our evolving identities?

Through rigorous research and intimate interviews with everyday people, Jezer-Morton explores how the platforms on which we have told our life stories for the past twenty years have determined what those stories have come to look and sound like. Today our attention spans are short, and our stories reflect that, with spectacle and exaggeration playing ever-larger roles in our accounts of everyday life. By examining how we share, talk, and post about our milestones, vacations, homes, relationships, hardships, politics, and more, Jezer-Morton shows just how pervasive and influential our social media platforms have become in how we view ourselves and what we consider to be a life well lived.

Smart, funny, and sharply observant, The Story of Your Life delivers an original and revealing look at our lives online and off and offers us a fresh perspective on the ways social media shapes the very arcs of our lives.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Technology, Audiobook, Psychology, History, Social Media

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 4, 2026

Reviews

[Christine Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s The Story of Your Life is a sharp, funny, and deeply observant study of how social media has become the architecture of our personal histories. She doesn’t scold or moralize; instead, she traces the way platforms like Instagram and TikTok have reshaped not only what we share but how we experience milestones, vacations, even grief.

What makes the book compelling is Jezer-Morton’s refusal to treat social media as trivial. She writes with sociological rigor and a journalist’s eye for detail, weaving interviews with ordinary users into long, beautiful passages on ambivalence. The result is a book that captures the paradox of our age: we curate our lives for an audience, yet those curated fragments become the very memories we carry forward.

The prose is disciplined and clear, never melodramatic, and the humor keeps the analysis buoyant. If anything, the book occasionally leans too heavily on examples from North American culture, but its insights travel well.

This isn’t a book about quitting social media. It’s about understanding how the platforms have rewired our sense of narrative and identity. For readers interested in cultural criticism that treats everyday life with seriousness, Jezer-Morton delivers.

[Imogen Starr · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 rounded up.

It's well written and at times insightful. No doubt the author is a good researcher. However, after the halfway point, I started to feel like I was reading the same chapter over and over again. Also, I was utterly perplexed by how the author's interview subjects fell into an incredibly narrow category: upper middle class American mothers. This was bizarre to me. If you are writing about social media, should you not widen your lens a bit? Why wasn't a teen or child interviewed about their relationship with social media? Or an elderly person? Or literally anyone other than an upper middle class American mother? The interviews could've been all very diverse and interesting, but instead I just kept hearing about how Lauren likes to post pictures of her kids' dance competitions on Instagram... It seemed like the book the author was trying to write was about American mothers' experience of social media, which is an entirely valid topic to explore. But it's borderline misleading to market this as a book that explores EVERYONE's experience of social media, then absolutely fail to interview or discuss anyone except a narrow subsection of the population.

[Sadhbh O'Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 rounded up. I thought a lot of this was fascinating and well written - I especially enjoyed the chapters on the home and on lying - but I struggled with two things.

One was the central premise and the focus on 'stories', I found the repetition in the framing chapters so much that it read like I was circling the drain rather than furthering my understanding of the point. I do think that more examples could have helped especially given she was trying to posit a new kind of narrative that was flat. It's hard to buy into this when the text itself says 'its hard to picture this'. I loved her use of her experience growing up in a commune for this but I think because it bookended it it came both too early and too late for my taste.

Two is that she is talking about a very specific style of posting as though it is universal. But it's just not anymore. I found that frustrating both as a reader and on her behalf that the nature of writing on digital life means you are always out of date.

Really enjoyed the way this invited me to think of though

[Jackie Tsaur]

I picked this up shortly after listening to Kathryn’s interview with The Atlantic. It scratches an itch I’ve had for a very long time on how we try to tell our stories through only the most sanitized depictions of our lives. As someone who regularly takes breaks from Instagram but has no plans of quitting altogether, I appreciate how there isn’t any finger-pointing or encouraging people to just go offline.

[Katy O. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciated this earnest deep dive into social media as storytelling because it helps explain WHY this medium has captured the minds and time of humanity over the past 20 years. Although I no longer use traditional social media for my own sharing, I do still share with an audience elsewhere and this book helped me ponder and reflect upon why, what and how I share my own story. This isn’t a takedown of social media, and it’s not an indictment of screens. It’s just of full-of-heart look at how humanity is telling their story in the modern age.

Source: purchased hardcover

[Molly Doe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Less of a ‘social media is bad’ book and more of a thoughtful combination of anecdotal and research-based evidence that explains how we are being impacted by it all. At times it felt a more specific to people who are online in connection to their work, but there were many moments that really resonated with my own feelings that have been hard to put into words.

[Ashlee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been a fan of Kathryn Jezer-Morton since her dissertation days and love her column BROODING, so this review may be biased, but I really enjoyed this study of social media and its impact on storytelling. Jezer-Morton argues that social media is an extension of neoliberal capitalism that turns us all into managers of our own personal brand. This style of storytelling rejects all forms of ambivalence in favour of narratives of triumph and resilience that obscure rising poverty and inequality. In this way we partake in our own self-run propaganda machine.

I enjoyed most Jezer-Morton’s discussion of ambivalence and appreciated learning new words for things I’d been observing on social media but didn’t have a name for (like McVulnerability, a term she borrows to describe when someone sets up their phone to film themselves crying). She devotes chapters to various sites of social media fascination and manipulation, from reproduction and vacations to interior design, with an approach that is less about rigorously nailing down a universal theory of social media storytelling than it is about opening up different avenues of interpretation. To this end the author draws on the work of a variety of cultural studies thinkers as well as personal interviews with influencers and users alike.

Jezer-Morton is witty and so observant—I loved how she includes personal memories of her life growing up on a commune, a place of many stories of persistence as well as failures, to illustrate the beauty that can be found in ambivalence. This, she hopes, can be a harnessed to achieve the resonance that we have historically sought through traditional storytelling and that social media algorithms seem to want to grind out of us. All in all this was a highly enjoyable, intellectual and fun foray into our strange times and the equally strange territory of social media.

[Bek's]

I wanted something deeper and more technical on this topic I guess?

[Dave Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
So many points as I was reading through this book where the author would do a sudden pivot from the appearance of focusing on the experiences of influencers to interesting and at times profound thoughts on a more universal application for humans at large. This is important, because this tension frames part of my own resonance with the ideas and the writing. I cannot relate to the life of the influencer, howewver I could relate to the common threads that bridge such social media users with society at large. It's probably true that given the title of the book I expected slightly more of the latter, a book about how social media shapes the life of the average person. But having finished the book I also think that tension plays as a bit of a sleight of hand. I'd probably say, the latter is the point, and the subject of influeners is actually a jumping off point into the broader discussion.

The real paradigm shift is found in the way Jezer-Morton argues for a better way of understanding social media's relationship to our lives on the level of a master narrative. The common way of speaking about social media is as a modern invention, and even an intrusion, however not only is social media written into the fabric of the whole of our lives and our world, to understand what it is requires us to address it on both a historical (universal) and a particular level. Social media doesn't arise out of thin air. Its roots are found in common human traits and social realities/functions that define this history. And yet it also has a particular shape and function unique to this moment. Thus, we begin with the simple recognition that even in our efforts to, for example, delete our social media accounts or take a certain hiatus, the shape of the world doesn't change. We aren't deleting ourselves from a world presently defined by this thing called social media. We do in fact still live in this same world, and social media is baked into the fabric of the whole, crossing any barriers between work and play, public and private, functional and forming.There is an irony to the idea as well that even the simple act of deleting a social media account is shaping a narrative by way of social media.

It's the historical part of this equation that I think can prove most illuminating. When we recognize what gives social media its power, that helps us to understand why the discussion matters. This recognition comes from an understanding of human and social function. The ways in which we, as humans, have always been engaged in this practice of reading and assessing people so as to know where it is that we belong. Every time we enter a room or have a conversation we are engaging this same practice, be it with people we don't know or people we know. Social media is simply a particular way in which this same expression manifests itself in our world and our relationships.

The particular shape of social media as a governing tool of “relationship making” in our modern setting is perhaps more well known, especially when it comes to the negative issues (isn't that the way it always is). The author goes to great lengths to explain what they are not saying- this book is not a "world has gone to hell" grumbling about these kids and their machines argument. Nevertheless, it would not be responsible to avoid discussing the very real and well documented realities of social medias shaping of epidemics of depression and lonliness and detachment and attention disorders. What's especially unique about social media is its scope. What's also unique is the way it both narrows the world of our experience while handing us a globalized reality. It's no suprise that "escape" has come to mean shutting the world out, and equally not suprising that what arises in its place is that common portrait of ones escape to nature (which yes, becomes its own narrative that gets filtered through social media, telling and shaping that story in its own way). What gets sacrificed is actual flesh and blood participation in the city or communal life.

There are no great answers to the problem. We can't just delete the world, and despite what we think we can't escape it. This is the world we occupy. Any discussion of actual transformation also can't disconnect itself from the history of human and social function.

There is a master narrative with a rather strong pull that seeks to critique the social media narrative as superficial, but is also bound to it lest we lose a grip on our elevating of the myth of modern progress. This is part of the problem: we cannot think or speak rationally about those interconnected forces of human and nature in this modern landscape. I would posit that an even greater problem emerges when we recognize the ways in which the whole enlightenment project has essentially worked to strip the world of the Divine as well, replacing it with the true ethos of this modern myth: technology. There in we have that modern dilemma, humans who covet the progress but fear the creations, lest they overturn the myth that hands us our modern exceptionalism.

All of that to say, one place the author posits as a starting point is to reclaim the part of the story that we have tended to become most ignorant of and even suspicious towards: the master narratives, or the meta-narratives that are govnerning our story (and our stories). This is my take on the authors thoughts, but in a world where the Divine has been exchanged for Technology, utilitarianism reigns supreme. This is the driving force of what we might call secular humanism. Meaning, the modern myth seeks to invoke the practice of presupposiitonalism in its appeal to "complexity" (which is essentially synonymous with the invoking of "God") as a catch-all, but it functions as a perpetual act of then seeking control over the world we inhabit through acts of reductionism and utilitarianism. In this sense one has already explained the complexity in certain terms. Complexity simply becomes a way of convincing ourselves that some kind of extant meaning to it all still exists. The important point: none of this is rational. It's also not coherent. What it does do however is expose a large gap between our explaining of the functional world that we inhabit and the ways in which reductionism and utilitarianism do not have an explanatory power when it comes to our experience of this world.

The way this feeds into that discussion about social media is simply to say, we cannot assess the narrative properly if all we are doing is explaining a function. We need Story. We need narrative. There's a fascinating section where the author is talking about an interesting point of tension in their own life when it came to a simple, every day common practice of posting a note and a picture celebrating an anniversary of a marriage. Here they found themselves caught in a dilemma. To post it is an innocent, and almost unconscious act that one can call normative, and even in certain terms good. And yet, to post it leads them to think about all the potential ways that act might inform the stories of others. What does her celebration say to the failed marriage? To the one in divorce? To the one in any manner of complicated subtext and subplot for which this celebration could communicate destructive narratives the author (poster) never intended? At the same time, not to post erases the particularness of their story as a couple.

It's a fascinating thought exercise, and one that gets to the heart of how the author is navigating the subject. Equally fascinating to look at how the author navigates towards fleshing out a possible answer. If it is important to preserve their (and our) experience as authentic, it is equally important to preserve the endless possible narratives that surround that at the same time. Part of the challenge however is that we are as much products of the world around us which are shaping a (and our) narrative as we are engaged in any manner of what we might call agency. Meaning, when faced with such dilemmas we tend to seek control of something that is in actuality outside of our control. Our brains seek to formulate this into coherent narratives or story(ies) that justify our participaton in the world, but part of the challenge is also knowing that far more often than not these stories don't actualy correlate with a reality that is reduced to its utility and its material properites. To be okay with posting our story is to do so in a world where that story does indeed impact countless other stories, largely in ways we will never know and can't control and in ways that will be equally destructive and beneficial. In a reductionist view, every act we take has this dual force, and this force acts on the world far outside any illusions of choice or will or control. Social media simply amplifies this potential.

That's the reality. But that is also why master narratives matter so much to how we rationalize this reality according to what we believe. If we are to justify our known experience, an experience that essentially revolves around those universal tendencies to know and be known, to belong and to, for lack of a better word, matter, our master narratives, which everyone holds whether they recognize it or not, is the only force that can reconcile our beliefs with reality itself. In fact, this is what makes social media so powerful.

The author betrays a certain tendency though in how she utlimately answers the tension of her posting analogy. The broad tendency of humans in the western world is to retreat into the comfortable language of agency and the will and control. She does that here, even after setting the stage for why such language is insufficient to explain the reality of the way the world works. Her primary move is to diminish (or strip) marriage as having any sort of inherent value beyond her choice and her circumstance, making it synonymous with every other experience, including divorce. This makes sense in terms of a desire to counter the potential forces that might shame the one who is divorced or tell them that their life is broken, and there is good reason to need and to want to do this. And yet, the author similtaneously jettisons the role of the master narrative in the process. If marriage has no inherent value, and if divorce is not defined in terms of a failed marriage, all we've done is reduced these things to their utility and stripped them of their meaning. There is no master narrative that can give either of these things their meaning and their sense, no story that can define them according to our actual experience of the world (that the longings of marriage reflect something outside of itself, and that the pain of divorce reflects something outside of itself).

The author goes so far as to claim divorce as the most normal thing one can do in a functional society, which of course begs the question: if we are always appealing to a master narrative even when we don't realize it, what master narrative does such a claim belong to, and what are the implications of that story. That would be where that discussion would need to go if we want to have a rational discussion about it.

Relativism has never been a coherent narrative and it never will be. It always points to underlying beliefs. And one of the dangers of the particular force of social media is that, given the ways it narrows the world, it trains us to think that a single belief governs the world, therefore subuming us into a discussion of mere reductonism and utility. The world doesn't work this way, and understanding the world by compartmentalizing belief in favour of function simply misconstrues and buries reality rather than illuminating it. Worse, it enslaves it to hierachies and cliques and power systems based on those human tendencies to measure ourselves against notions of insiders and outsiders. When we can no longer discuss belief nor seek to understand the implications of our beliefs around a table filled with differing master narratives, we become less and less rational and less and less able to attend for the world itself. And again, social media not only heightens this problem, it tends to isolate the most hostile and superficial tendencies of this human problem.

Lots to think about. I wrote a piece a while ago when I was in the process of reading this book. Figured I would post the link here just as an addition to my thoughts above:

http://thestoriesofmylife.ca/2026/08/...

[Madison ✨ (mad.lyreading) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is about something I think many a millennial has thought about -- how is social media changing me, and how am I changing because of social media? Jezer-Morton examines this in a very neutral way, which I appreciate. She is not saying social media is the root of all evil, but she's also recognizing that it *is* impacting us. While I found the insight to this book to be very intersting, it was very anecdotal and more observation-based. I wanted a bit more social science behind it. Regardless, it did make me think about how I have presented myself, how (and if) I want to present myself, and how I am experiencing others because of social media. I wouldn't say highly recommend, but if you are inclined to pick it up, you will likely enjoy it.

Thank you to Viking and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

[Susan Scribner · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Interesting but somewhat repetitive essays about the ways in which social media is changing our very concept of self. Surprisingly, Jezer-Morton doesn't necessarily want us to ditch our smartphones; this isn't The Anxious Generation. But she encourages us to think of ourselves outside of the neat, linear stories that show us climbing the ladder of personal and professional success. The most thought-provoking aspect of the book IMO is the presentation of social media as a continuum of previous media like scrapbooking, picture postcards, and epic poetry. So often Instagram, Facebook, et al are considered to be modern abominations, but we have always wanted to share our stories.

As a weary xoomer who lived 50 years without social media, I'm somewhat bemused by this millennial handwringing over something that can readily be avoided by picking up a book once in a while. And while it appears that not all of her interview subjects are white, middle-class city dwellers....well, most of them are. But I appreciate Jezer-Morton's championing the murkier gray aspects of our life experiences. Not everything has to be a "journey!"

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past few decades, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have revolutionized how we document and share our lives. Montreal-based journalist and New York Times columnist Jezer-Morton explores how these algorithm-driven platforms transform our experiences and also how we share them.

As the author writes, we’re not just in the Information Age anymore; we’re in the Attention Age, and we all have a limited amount of attention to give. Maybe one day there will be a better way to tell our stories. Until something new comes along, we’re probably going to keep scrolling. Social media is here to stay, and we have the power to uplift spirits or distort the truth.

At times the book reads like a university textbook in the way it tackles the topic and with its research. While negativity often seems to dominate the pages, making social media feel (as she says) like the final frontier, it will get you thinking about how you choose to spend your screen time.

[Kirsti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful and earnest argument that humans are natural storytellers, but social media rewards only certain types of stories (ones in which things continually get better), which is why we often feel empty and dissatisfied after spending time on social media. It doesn't provide ways for us to express all the stories and moods of our lives. Most of us can't or won't risk our social capital by revealing that we are sometimes monetarily broke or emotionally broken.

The book has some interesting tangents too. For instance, Jezer-Morton says that interior design became blank, bland, and hotel-like for a long time because influencers needed neutral backgrounds to showcase the products they were paid to plug.

The author spent her childhood in a commune, and I found her viewpoint somewhat unusual but appealing.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well researched and well written book about our tendency to view our lives and experiences through the lens of social media and how that changes our perception. Definitely gave me a lot to think about and validated some things I had already been noticing in my own life so that I can understand it as a larger shared experience and not feel like ‘the only one’. Some arguments lost me a bit but I particularly enjoyed the early chapters which focused on different parts of our lives and how the lens through which we experience them has shifted due to social media’s influence. I think social media is such a large topic that it can be tricky to write about but the arguments in this book were really on the nose and contemplative in the way I want a non-fiction book to be.

[Blake Lagneaux · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

Thoroughly researched and compellingly presented, this is a fascinating look at the state of social media as it affects how we craft our own personal narratives. This reframing — social media as a template for how we define our selves and our stories — is pretty alarming, especially in the context of the history of storytelling. Our perception of the range of experiences seems to be narrowing because online we are all trained to focus on growth, success, redemption, and selling. The assessment is bleak, but I think it can serve as a real wake up call to encourage sharing all parts of our messy lives (the parts that make us human). This book confirms how desperately we need authentically human art and stories.

[vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited for this book. It’s another in line with books on social media I’ve read in the past 5 or so years. It has some insightful queries and ideas, yet feels too generalized in its findings and too specific in its subjects. Most everyone we learn about is a peer of the author, or a friend of a friend. This is almost exclusively an elder millennial white liberal woman perspective. There is nothing wrong with that, but with a title like The Story of Your Life, I expected something with a bit more of a punch. I recommend books the author mentions in the text instead, such as Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein. Other interesting books on influencers include Like, Follow, Subscribe by Fortessa Laffi and No Filter by Sarah Frier.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, honestly. This is a very interesting topic and it is so pervasive that every chapter had at least one point or idea that gave me pause because I could see how it applied to my life or I could easily identify it in people around me. There is a lot of good "food for thought" in this. I really appreciated that this wasn't bogged down with "how to fix" everything wrong with social media but was more focused on bringing things to attention and into a conversation.

[Isabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

An all-encompassing overview of the role social media plays in our daily lives, and the effects on society as a result. Jezer-Morton does not attempt to provide solutions to the problems raised, but rather allows readers to find what works for them based on their reactions to the information presented. This is an important novel for today's climate.

Thank you to the publisher for my copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[T'Jae Freeman · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

as a gen z zillenial who grew up playing outside and on the internet i am always intrigued about reading about social media and the ways in which it rules our lives and flattens our experiences. if you are the same i’d recommend this one. also this book mentions vincenzo latronico’s perfection and if you know you know i love that book because it so greatly captured ennui of living in a digital world. that’s my plug for you to read it and filterworld by kyle chaka.

[eileen · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

This is a well-written book. Each chapter reads like a short essay and the concepts are easy to follow. It does get repetitive at times and I found the focus somewhat narrow. The interview subjects all seem like they come from generally the same backgrounds and the analysis only considered certain types of social media engagement (and talked about them as if they were universal). I kept waiting for the part where the author would mention alternative or resistant uses of social media that contrast the main types of stories she identified.

I appreciated the section on grievances and the discussion of resonance. I’m always fascinated how the stories we tell shape our realities, and Jezer-Morton does a good job of identifying how social media can become a barrier to imaginative storytelling.

[Michelle Yau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exactly as the title says which is sometimes rare for a non-fiction - I feel like some get lost in "research". This is about the storytelling of our lives - how we've been altered (even for people that don't post, the consumption has evolved our brains and capacity for stories and storytelling). I think this is a must-read and my fav Latronico's Perfection gets a shout!

[Angela DiCristofaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smart, observant, and not preachy.

My one noodle was that it diagnoses so well but doesn't offer solutions. I wish she'd pushed further on a few topics and dug into some research or at least tried to imagine paths toward reconciliation, even speculative ones.
Naming the problem is satisfying, but I wanted her to sit in the "so what now" a little longer.

[Jean Edelstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

As it happened, I read this while on a low-tech camping trip in a cell service black hole, but you don’t have to be in this environment to vibe (as KJM might say) with this astute, rigorous, somewhat damning but also very kind and human book. Really quenched my desire to post on Instagram.

[Patricia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another book that felt like I was reading it forever, but then was surprised to learn it was only 272 because it felt like twice that. The thesis of this book is good, and there were some interesting sections. It could have benefited from greater organization and focus. Felt like rambling between personal stories, interviews that all started to sound the same, and little bits of legitimately interesting research.

[Kenzie Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes yes yes!! This book is good. It explores and articulates what most of us already know deep down and it does so in a thought provoking manner. Great as an audiobook. Pertinent and interesting.

[dobbs the dog · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an absolutely fascinating look at how social media has shaped how we experience the world and how that is shaping how we interact in the world.

Only posting the more "Instagrammable" pictures to only wearing an outfit once, because you don't want your followers to see you in the same thing twice, to viewing the world in terms of how others would perceive it. Only taking pictures of places that you think others would want to see, not because you want to have those memories. And while I personally don't think that I fall entirely into this (I am constantly rewearing things, I don't care), it really did make me consider how I take pictures and what I take pictures of. I was recently at an author event and got a couple of cool pictures of the author, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, oh, this would be a cool picture to post, instead of, oh, here is this author I really enjoy, I'll get a few pics to remember it.

It's also something I see with my kids, they always want to see any pictures I take of them, and the 15 year old in particular, will demand I delete certain pictures if she thinks she doesn't look perfect in them. I usually don't, but then I'm also not posting those pictures, they're for me, but she's still viewing them in that way.

Highly recommend this book if you have any online presence at all.

[Rachel Struxness · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve always known social media is a highlight reel, but this book really unpacked that from an anthropological angle. I liked!

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

academic yet accessible without being too think piece-y. definitely recommend for anyone interested in the sociology behind social media.

[Winyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4? 5? stars)
- man, the vocab in this is working my brain (in a nice way!)
- I look at influencers, and people who post on social media generally, much differently now - what is our narrative that we're showing: it's always up and to the right, never stagnant or backwards
- reminds me of how "it's embarrassing to have a boyfriend" because the narrative now has the potential to be interrupted
- I appreciate the interviews, the short interactions the author has to show how something we may not think is "that deep", is indeed, QUITE deep
- am I better than this, if I just use my Instagram a certain way? Is it best to just lurk?
- this book is challenging the grand narrative: no clear path forward for us, only considerations
- like an everyman's academic book on social media

[joumana · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

„the fetishization of the perfect capture has become a prison in which many people live, falsly equating the accomplishment of grammable aesthetics with skillfulness and a high quality of life.“

pretty much sums up one of the main reasons why I deleted social media (although I don't think the point of the book was to convince us to do so).