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

by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

The Story of Your Life is an exploration of how social media storytelling has transformed the way we make sense of our own experiences, and an incitement to embrace the ways our lives resist capture.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton, the sociologist and journalist behind 'Brooding', her newsletter at New York magazine's The Cut, breaks down social media tropes around everything from engagements to birthday parties to divorce. In so doing, Kathryn aims to uncover the deeper truths about how what we see and share on social media is rewriting the ways we make sense of our own everyday experiences. How has online dating influenced the way we see (or fail to see) each other? What do we consciously and subconsciously teach our kids when we painstakingly plan and document milestones and celebrations? How do our vacations, our homes, and our politics show up online – and how does what we see online impact the way we travel, decorate, and think about our values?

The Story of Your Life explores these ideas and invites the reader to start thinking differently about how we interact with social media and the world.

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

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 4, 2026

Reviews

[Christine Hall]

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.

[Sadhbh O'Sullivan]

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

[Imogen Starr]

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.

[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.

[Ashlee]

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.

[Dave Courtney]

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/...

[Marvin]

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]

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]

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.

[Jordan]

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.

[Michelle Yau]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[Stef]

Eh....2.5 stars. It was alright in some parts.

[Kenzie Jones]

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.

[Morgan]

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

[kayla]

Teetering between a 3 and 4. Really interesting, would encourage anyone with an Instagram account to read. Author is a millennial and her research is predominantly with millennials. This whole book is told largely through that perspective and when referencing any other generation they are described as “other” to a degree.
Some of the trends / phenomena she talks about I am aware of but do not engage with in the way she talks about herself and millennials doing so. And so she would lose me at some points, but was still thought provoking and relevant.

[Winyen]

(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

[Chey]

An interesting exploration of how our storytelling traditions are changing with the use of social media. This would be a good companion read with Adam Aleksic’s Algospeak.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

[Ryo]

I received a copy of this book for free in a Goodreads giveaway.

Interesting book about how the rise of social media has changed the way we live our lives and how we tell stories about them. The author includes a lot of personal experiences and insights gleaned from talking to people, and it's a readable mix of memoir and research. There are times, though, when the author meanders in her thoughts and just fires an overwhelming barrage of questions at the reader, and I also could not help but wish at times that there were more scholarly sources cited.

The author, a self-described lover of social media, discusses how the presence of social media has shaped the way that people live their lives in so many ways, including the way they vacation, celebrate, and even grieve. The book is well-organized, breaking down the many aspects of human life that social media touches, and the author has collected a lot of anecdotes from people on social media about how it has affected the way they document these experiences and tell stories about them. The author includes enough examples from her own life that it feels personal like a memoir, but also balances the memoir side with stories she gathered from talking to others, and personally I liked this mix of memoir and field research. It gives the book a personal touch while also including a diversity of other people's experiences, which also makes it easier to look at some of the things that people do for social media that can seem quite ridiculous. I also appreciated that the book touches on how Western culture really appreciates the master narrative of redemption, which explains a lot of the stories on social media.

There are times, though, when it felt like the author inserted some unedited streams of consciousness into the book, and it felt overwhelming. There's several places where the author poses multiple questions in a row. They're certainly interesting questions, but it's impossible to keep all of those in mind while reading when there's a litany of them without much organization. Some editing may have been helpful in these places. There's a handful of sources cited in the back of the book, and the author references some serious scholarly works, but this taste of rigor just made me want more. Instead of a couple of anecdotes from some momfluencers with a couple dozen followers each, is there a more general trend or conclusion that can be reached from a study? It was hard not to keep asking this question while reading.

But overall, the author has written a very readable and approachable examination of social media and how it's shaped our lives as well as the way we tell stories about them online. The book is well-organized and shows just how many aspects of modern life have been invaded by social media. It's a nice mix of personal memoir and research, though I do wish that there were a bit more serious research than there is, and I could do with fewer litanies of questions.

[Alexa Taylor]

In this nonfiction book, Kathryn Jezer-Morton examines how social media has become a modern vehicle for storytelling through a sociological perspective. She travels around the country interviewing and spending time with a range of social media users, from mom-fluencers to casual Instagram posters, to explore how people make sense of their lives by sharing their experiences online. She traces the development of storytelling throughout human history and connects these traditions to the visual narratives we create on social media today, particularly the ways people document and preserve significant moments such as pregnancies, weddings, birthdays, and other milestones.
One of the book’s strengths is its relatively positive perspective on social media. Rather than focusing exclusively on its negative effects (which is usually what anyone says about social media use), Jezer-Morton considers how platforms like Instagram and Facebook can serve as tools for preserving memories, documenting personal experiences, and even maintaining aspects of culture. At the same time, she acknowledges the ways social media can influence our perceptions of success and shape what we consider worth sharing. I particularly enjoyed her discussion of how these platforms create certain expectations around what a successful life should look like and how users respond to the feedback they receive.
However, I did not find the research especially groundbreaking. Many of the themes she explores, such as the increased engagement women receive during pregnancy and the psychological effects of receiving this attention, are ideas I have encountered before in YouTube video essays and other discussions about social media culture. While Jezer-Morton provides an interesting sociological framework for examining these topics, I often felt that her conclusions were familiar rather than particularly novel.
Overall, I found the book to be an interesting exploration of storytelling and social media, especially in its examination of how technology has transformed the ways we document and remember our lives. I would recommend it to someone looking for an introduction to social media culture or to readers who are particularly interested in the sociological evolution of storytelling.

[Amanda Chang]

content - 9/10
style - 8.5/10
resonance - 9/10

i have always wondered what the larger long-term effects of social media use on our lives would be - beyond the shortening of attention spans and instant gratification. when i saw the announcement of this book i knew i had to pick it up (i even marked out the release date on my calendar!) and i am so so pleased that i did, i absolutely zoomed through this one and will be rereading soon!

i really like how empathetic jezer-morton is to the current young adult plight of what to do about our social media addiciton - on one hand i know how bad it is for me and on the other hand i just can't stop. jezer-morton's writing doesn't feel sanctimonious, and instead seriously considers the less tangible long-term effects of always thinking of how we present ourselves online.

there were many sections i found illuminating. the section on vacations which traces the history of first sharing holiday pictures through postcards to the meticulous composition of our vacation pictures today was such a highlight - urging readers to truly question why we do what we do. i also really loved the section reflecting on resonance and its unpredictability, which exists as the direct antithesis to social media (which tries to capture and share resonance but in doing so, fails to ever truly capture it).

i really appreciate jezer-morton's recognition the inability of social media as a tool for capturing and sharing the complex human experience, highlighting its failure to share "flat" stories. in a world that feels like everyone everywhere is constantly having the time of their life, there is no space for nuance that permeates the every day mundanity. this is a particularly empathetic take to me, as the fault lies with the platform and its creators (AS IT SHOULD!!!) instead of the personal responsibility of every day users.

if you're looking for a book that truly encourage you to reflect on the way you use social media that doesn't just give holier-than-thou advice like "throw away your phone", this is THAT book!

[Meg]

I listened to the audiobook version read by KJM herself. This book is a collection of research, observations and conversations on how the use of social media has rewired how its users experience everything in life from the mundane to the most significant events in our lives. Split in to chapters on the various topics in this range like vacations, celebrations, hardships (and more) - every part provided examples of things I had seen or been a participant of myself. What I appreciated most was that this book wasn’t preaching how bad social media is, why to quit it, or offering advice of any kind - it was simply shedding light and kicking up the conversation on things nearly every social media user already knows. KJM openly admits her fondness of social media and uses herself as her own example multiple times. What I was surprised most by was her highlight that it really doesn’t matter how much someone actually posts themselves, if they are still consuming content, the bulk of this book still rings true.

This listened like a TedTalk for me and was interesting to listen to thanks to Kathryn’s journalism background and touches of humor. As I kept listening I thought about how much I appreciated that I didn’t need to hang on her every word to follow the conversation, it was easy. That being said, towards the end she seemed to mention more about the commune that she grew up on and I ended feeling like maybe I had missed something in the beginning about it. Maybe it was an anecdote to help get her points out but I still would have listened to more about that - it sounded just as interesting! Overall this was a thought provoking listen and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes to take a step back every once in a while and consider the effects of social media regardless of the capacity in which and how much they use it.

[Bettys Book Club]

I'm fascinated by the psychology of social media, and this book examines how platforms have changed the way we've narrated our lives over the past 20 years. But what interested me most wasn't HOW we post. It was WHY.

What exactly are we performing online?

We don't simply document vacations, relationships, celebrations, grief, or even the books we read. We select, frame, caption, and package those experiences for other people. Eventually, you have to wonder whether we're sharing the story of our lives or quietly shaping our lives into stories worth sharing.

It even made me look at this account differently. What do my book reviews tell you about me? Am I simply sharing what I read, or am I curating an identity through those choices? Am I performing intellectualism? I hope not 😂 But intention and perception aren't necessarily the same thing.

That's what makes this book so fascinating. Jezer-Morton isn't wagging her finger and telling us social media is BAD. She asks much more uncomfortable questions about how these platforms have changed our understanding of identity, experience, and what a life worth documenting is supposed to look like.

You'll finish this book questioning everything you see online, including your own posts.

We spend so much time looking through the screen at other people's lives that we rarely stop to consider who's reflected in the black mirror.

[Richard Thompson]

I have read a lot of books already about how social media is toxic, and how it distorts our values, twists our brains, and turns us into zombies and inauthentic performative assholes. All of that is undeniable and Ms. Jezer-Morton acknowledges it, but she looks behind the selfies, the curated fake videos and the non-stop misrepresentation of the seemingly wonderful lives of social media posters to find the human beings behind these things. The product that they post may be toxic, but there are often good motivations behind it and the people who do this are, well, people. As Pogo, the comic strip possum of my childhood, once said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." I need to give myself an attitude adjustment and look at these people with more compassion. If this book had been written by 90% of social media addicts, I would probably have sneered at it. Indeed, I started this book with a sneer and only came around to a different perspective as I continued to read. Ms. Jezer-Morton is a special person among influencers. She tells us about her own background growing up on a commune in rural Vermont and her continuing connection to the place as it struggles on in the 21st century. It has given her a unique point of view that allows her to see much more of her own BS than other writers about social media and to come off as a decent person with whom I could enjoy a long conversation or maybe even become a friend.

[Myles]

There are some trenchant observations in Jezer-Morton's study of social media use.

Her observations on personal branding by influencers are wise and thoughtful. Indeed, the process of becoming an influencer changes how you see things, what you see, and how you judge the landscape.

The camera makes us act out, she quotes from her father.

No-one in our family posts pictures of themselves or of our homes that identify where we live. When we go on vacations we do not post pictures of where we are. We don't post pictures of family gatherings.

We understand the surveillance value of the web to commercial interests and these social media platforms.

As a businessman I am very aware that my comments online could affect how people perceive my business, and I want no part of chasing away potential customers. So I censor myself.

That said, I treat social media for the most part as a neighborhood forum for things that could affect us all. Because I read a lot I may catch changes to the environment that my neighbors miss.

You are not going to find observations of men's and few of children's use of social media in this study. Jezer-Morton is almost exclusively concerned with women.

[Skylar Miklus]

There were some valuable insights here, and I think Jezer-Morton has a solid thesis: social media tools have become the primary meaning-making tool we rely on to understand our own lives. I got some sense of how this transformation has affected public life, but the takeaways of the book felt fairly muddled. The tone felt highly conversational, and subject matter was mixed between sociological research, interviews with case study users, and personal insights. For some reason, the balance of these three elements in the book felt off to me; maybe I wanted more of the memoiristic elements, because the story of Jezer-Morton's upbringing on a New England commune was intriguing. The interviews felt largely same-y and she could've likely reduced them by half. At times I wondered how relatable this book can be for people who aren't well-off millennial women, especially considering the interview subjects. But maybe I'm just not supposed to be the target audience here? I overall felt like it was fine, inoffensive but she could've taken her conclusions farther. Thank you to Edelweiss+ and Viking for the digital ARC.

[Geoffrey Bateman]

I did not like this book, but I am glad I read it. My dislike stems in part from how disturbing I found the reality that Jezer-Morton describes in terms of how profoundly her (and many, many others') subjectivity has been shaped by the pressures social media has put upon her in her life. Somehow I seem to have escaped the damaging influence she describes; for example, the constant pressure to cultivate, promote, and protect your brand via your social media presence. I really have never approached my limited use of a platform like Facebook in that way. I appreciate she gives voice to this experience and explores it in a multifaceted way. But what she describes makes me feel a deep sadness for our world, and an anger at those who created this technology. For all the good it can do, I'm left feeling even more skeptical of it. I also found the argumentation and evidence rather slim in this volume. Many assumptions shared without backing, and the examples that she did provide, a fairly selective slice of a particular demographic. And like many other readers, I found the organization less effective than it might have been.

[Lauren]

I liked this book. Very much.

The only social media I use regularly are LinkedIn (professional - need to), Goodreads (I love books and book lovers), and the climbing app Kaya (same). But Instagram? Facebook? Waste of my limited time and even more limited brain space.

So, why am I reading yet another book about social media you ask? Well, this wasn't a book about how bad social media is for all of us. It was more nuanced than that, and the author isn't anti-social media at all. She was looking at the ways in which we live differently because of social media, and that was a topic I found interesting. Regardless of my usage of social media, it's affecting the way all of us move through life. It's affecting the spaces people create (they need to be "grammable"). It's affecting what we want.

Jezer-Morton is a sociologist, and she's smart. Her observations are astute.

Highly recommended.