The Story of Your Life
How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything
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The Story of Your Life
Narrated by:
Kathryn Jezer-Morton
Pre-order Now for £12.78
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Narrated by:
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Kathryn Jezer-Morton
Summary
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.
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Critic reviews
Praise for The Story of Your Life
"Kathryn Jezer-Morton is invaluable: one of our greatest chroniclers of the norms of American domestic life, one of our most astute interpreters of performance and gloss. The Story of Your Life is an essential study of the ordinary use of social media—it’s poignant and easygoing and never preachy, and crucially, it’s focused on people who exist outside over-dissected coastal norms. Jezer-Morton is utterly free of defensive postures and self-righteousness, averse to the cynicism about others and false innocence about the self that defines so much of the internet—yet she’s always a sharp, generous critic of these very things. This book is a classic in the critical project of relating surface to structure, and a milestone work on what’s lost when our narrative imagination is disciplined into a rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm."
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
"Whenever I want to think more carefully about something in my online world that annoys or fascinates me, I go to Kathryn Jezer-Morton. She's a trenchant analyst who's also a nuance queen—and The Story of Your Life is Jezer-Morton operating at the height of her (tremendous) powers."
—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even and Out of Office
"An unexpectedly moving look at how algorithmic social platforms shape not just our tastes but our capacity to discern and process our own experiences, and imagine the boundaries of our possible futures. The Story of Your Life manages to both alarm and reassure, exposing social media’s power over us while reminding us that storytelling—the medium humans have always relied on for survival—is endlessly resilient."
—Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less and Filterworld
“A shrewd analysis of how social media has restricted the stories people tell about themselves and others. . . . The author balances her account with humor . . . she offers incisive critiques, most notably about the hidden economic power at work; these ‘tales of resilience and triumph,’ she explains, function to hide increasing economic disparity: ‘We are telling these stories as proof that we can thrive in an economic order that has largely left ordinary people behind.’ It’s a thought-provoking interrogation of what goes unposted and why.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Kathryn Jezer-Morton is invaluable: one of our greatest chroniclers of the norms of American domestic life, one of our most astute interpreters of performance and gloss. The Story of Your Life is an essential study of the ordinary use of social media—it’s poignant and easygoing and never preachy, and crucially, it’s focused on people who exist outside over-dissected coastal norms. Jezer-Morton is utterly free of defensive postures and self-righteousness, averse to the cynicism about others and false innocence about the self that defines so much of the internet—yet she’s always a sharp, generous critic of these very things. This book is a classic in the critical project of relating surface to structure, and a milestone work on what’s lost when our narrative imagination is disciplined into a rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm."
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
"Whenever I want to think more carefully about something in my online world that annoys or fascinates me, I go to Kathryn Jezer-Morton. She's a trenchant analyst who's also a nuance queen—and The Story of Your Life is Jezer-Morton operating at the height of her (tremendous) powers."
—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even and Out of Office
"An unexpectedly moving look at how algorithmic social platforms shape not just our tastes but our capacity to discern and process our own experiences, and imagine the boundaries of our possible futures. The Story of Your Life manages to both alarm and reassure, exposing social media’s power over us while reminding us that storytelling—the medium humans have always relied on for survival—is endlessly resilient."
—Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less and Filterworld
“A shrewd analysis of how social media has restricted the stories people tell about themselves and others. . . . The author balances her account with humor . . . she offers incisive critiques, most notably about the hidden economic power at work; these ‘tales of resilience and triumph,’ she explains, function to hide increasing economic disparity: ‘We are telling these stories as proof that we can thrive in an economic order that has largely left ordinary people behind.’ It’s a thought-provoking interrogation of what goes unposted and why.”
—Publishers Weekly
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