THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, by Kathryn Jezer-Morton
The email arrived after midnight, from an older friend whose intellect and literary taste I respect deeply.
“Why didn’t you ‘like’ my post of [names of his children and pets redacted]?” he wrote in apparent sincerity. “I know you’re sort of opposed to people putting kids on there, but I also know you’ve posted photos of [names of my children and pets redacted] (and I ‘like’ them…).”
Abashed — for him, for myself, for our children and pets, for society at large — I opened Instagram and delivered the digital valentine.
Then I opened “The Story of Your Life,” by Kathryn Jezer-Morton, which helps explain how two pals could end up in this terrible, time-wasting, thumb-numbing place.
Jezer-Morton writes Brooding, a thoughtful newsletter in The Cut about family and its digital discontents. She has a doctorate in sociology for which she researched momfluencers, the 21st century’s retort to Tupperware party hostesses.
“The Story of Your Life,” her first book, has kind of a Tupperware aspect itself, sorting the dank stew of social-media behavior into separate container-chapters with titles like “Vacations” and “Politics.” It’s sealed with a kiss of memoir: the story of her life.
Jezer-Morton was raised on a commune in southern Vermont once called Total Loss Farm. Failed ventures there included a grain collective — the state’s soil is generally too rocky for wheat — and commercial maple sugaring. Her first encounter with social media was a group journal written in a spiral notebook; “in a lot of ways, it was an analog Facebook,” she writes. Friendster, Myspace and real Facebook followed.
All was sweet innocent fun for a while. Then the algorithm came along and ruined everything, like a drifter in a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Actually the trouble had started sooner, in the late 1990s, when the term “personal branding” ballooned in public discourse (as balloons, being Instagrammable, have since ballooned at parties) after a cover story in Fast Company magazine.
Jezer-Morton writes that the college students she teaches, digital natives who grew up with smartphones and avatars, have trouble even understanding “personal branding” as an isolated concept. “It’s like asking them to describe the particular characteristics of the air they’ve been breathing their whole lives,” she writes.
Older academics like Jonathan Haidt and Sherry Turkle have published thundering best sellers about the deleterious effects of screens, leading to changes in policy and behavior; many schoolchildren are now forced to surrender smartphones at the door, and adults have developed elaborate etiquette rituals restricting their use.
To Jezer-Morton that horse has left the barn, galloping away with not only our attention spans but our sense of identity, both individual and collective. Her tone is less prescriptive than breezily inquisitive.
“What if social media narratives enclose us in versions of life that can feel claustrophobic and unsatisfying?” she wonders. “What if these narratives have undermined our sense of ease and belonging? What if these narratives — many of which appear perfectly harmless — are linked to some of the biggest challenges we face around social justice and equity, our ability to affirm our kids’ identities, and the mental health of adults and children alike?”
If I may quote Charlie Brown and his cohort: “Aaugh!”
Jezer-Morton tiptoes, by my lights, a little tentatively into the field, interviewing a fashion influencer in Scottsdale, Ariz., who color-coordinates her family beach trips shot by professional photographers. She drops into a Sugar Factory restaurant where the service is choreographed and food prepared, including a hamburger coated in gold leaf, to maximize digital engagement. She investigates (by phone) increasingly over-the-top Nigerian wedding culture and talks to a practitioner of “nontoxic living” with 200,000 followers — “I’ll call her Carolyn” — in Texas.
Head-scratchingly, she gives the majority of her subjects pseudonyms “for privacy reasons.” How is it that people so out there online are spooked by the old-fashioned technology of appearing between covers?
But what “The Story of Your Life” lacks in reportorial ferocity, it makes up in intellectual generosity. Jezer-Morton regards online habits as part of a humanistic continuum that includes picture postcards, scrapbooking and epic poetry (if a three-hour movie of the “Odyssey” seems like too much, what about memorizing and reciting the entire shebang?). She gracefully invokes Ursula LeGuin’s “carrier bag” theory of fiction and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ennui at Niagara Falls.
Her book contextualizes our new memes and online community enactments alongside old rituals like the shivaree, when newlyweds were dragged from their beds by neighbors, and the wassail, a.k.a. singing to trees in the winter, which Jezer-Morton enacts with her own family every year.
Most notably, Jezer-Morton offers long, beautiful passages on ambivalence, one of the shady human emotions that social media — with its bright performative hits, its “journeys” and its insistence on redemption — fails to capture.
Her book is hopeful and unscolding. It will make you think twice about putting in the extra work on vacation to show your Close Friends just how happy and relaxed you are.
THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything | By Kathryn Jezer-Morton | Viking | 272 pp. | $30