Apologies to Kathryn Jezer-Morton: I read The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything immediately prior to going on vacation and now the distance is making this a challenging review to write. I would like to note, however, that when I was reading it and immediately after reading it, I found it endlessly reference-able. Jezer-Morton’s finger is so ‘on the pulse’ that I found I kept bringing it up in conversation to help explain so many of our everyday experiences.
Jezer-Morton’s approach is simultaneously academic and anecdotal. For instance, she may go from referencing Baudrillard to a famous influencer in the same breath. I appreciated that balance of ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ throughout the text; it enriched the work and elevated our the discourse around phenomena as common as posting vacation pictures.
The book covers the phenomena we post, like vacations, birthdays, baby announcements, personal struggles and grief, and so on. While I don’t recall her mentioning Paul Ricoeur specifically, his notion that we understand ourselves through ‘life stories’ seems pertinent here. We edit our stories in a way that helps to shape our conceptions of ourselves. For instance, when we go on vacation, we post pictures of what we understand to be the purpose of travel and bring ourselves into the narrative of a life-changing trip, even if it disappoints us. In fact, everything we post, the author suggests, is part of our ‘brand.’ Each of us is a brand that we maintain by curating and posting details strategically, even when we don’t realize we’re doing it. The fact is, we follow conventions we’re not aware of, and it’s strange to see ourselves beholden to those social media patterns.
The chapters about ‘celebrations’ and ‘reproduction’ were interesting. In particular, I learned that the whole notion of a ‘gender reveal’ party was born on social media as a way to engage with audiences. Jezer-Morton problematizes gender reveals (a misnomer in their own right, by the way…) and points to the harms that have occurred as a result—like people starting forest fires with their colourful fireworks. More interesting to me is that the first people to do it and post it on social media regret the direction it took. I’m interested in the long-term consequences of something that seemed innocuous to begin with.
Some chapters strike an interesting balance; Jezer-Morton is not of the mind that social media needs to be abolished, and it’s compelling to see how it produces access for some subsets of the population. In one chapter, Jezer-Morton talks about a restaurant in LA, I think The Sugar Factory if I remember correctly, and its strange place in culture. She describes the restaurant as not being particularly good but it gains notoriety because it caters so specifically to social media; all the food is ‘showy’ (even though it often goes uneaten, according to one of the employees). Servers bring out drinks with special effects and they do elaborate dances for the patrons. It’s a mid-level restaurant, a little pricey, but less expensive than, say, taking kids on vacation. The argument goes that taking photos there is a way of advertising wealth and glamour when one can’t fully engage in elaborate vacations. It’s a way of getting access to a wealthy conception of self when reality doesn’t align, exactly. Jezer-Morton describes going to the restaurant twice; the first night doesn’t have any instantiations of servers dancing, so her contact tells her to come back again the following night. One of the meals The Sugar Factor offers is a hamburger covered in 24K gold leaf (if that isn’t symbolic, I don’t know what is). The chapter ends on the server’s powerful line, told to her in secret, that tomorrow the family will “shit gold.”
The text documents a number of influencers’ perspectives and experiences, and one thing that comes up is that it is still gauche, verboten even, to display poverty online. One influencer describes really challenging experiences with two former partners who are both addicts, one of whom the woman sent to jail. She documents the abuses she was subjected to and puts it online to help process the grief and create connection. Among everything, though, she notes that you can never post about financial challenges. Audiences are not prepared for that. Of course, that extends into the posts of people who are using social media for business. Being honest about a failed MLM, for example, spells disaster for anyone trying to cling to the illusion.
The Story of Your Life also explores the haunting effect of monetizing our lives for others’ entertainment. For instance, a number of influencers make their living by posting their family content. From pregnancy announcements forward, couples will often share their experiences as parents and post their kids. The reality is, though, that after a certain age: audiences don’t care. Parents either need to have more children or pivot. It’s such a dark undercurrent to the family friendly content knowing that there’s an expiration date on the cute children that parents are profiting from. Let’s not even get started on trad wives.
One chapter that is particularly odd to me is the one on grief. Recognizing that we still must not show grief about lacking money, other forms of grief are acceptable and encouraged. Communities form around grief. I just have such a hard time seeing it as sincere rather than performative. If someone is upset and crying about traumatic loss, for example, I can’t help but picture that they recorded it in the moment, then took time to edit, then took time to post. To me, there’s so much distance from the actual grief and that performance of immediacy takes me out of it entirely. Jezer-Morton again points towards a balance; some people find genuine connection and community around grief.
These pockets of the internet are interesting to consider on their own, but I think the strength of Jezer-Morton’s book is in articulating how social media shapes the way we live. In some ways it’s like that classic debate of whether art imitates life or vice versa (do we count social media as art?). We have been conditioned to now see our lives through the lens of social media. We decide what is worth doing based on what is worth posting—what food we eat, what sights we see on vacation, how we choose to celebrate.
We also shape our lives around narratives that build; we act as if we’re building towards some kind of climax, as if our life is made of big moments. Towards the end of the text, Jezer-Morton makes a gesture towards ‘flat narratives,’ stories that are not decided by big moments. She thinks back to growing up on a commune where life was flat and where people shared notes in a guest book like an early form of social media. She imagines a world in which we share our quiet moments rather than emphasizing the big ones, a life where not much happens, but that we value those tiny moments. I’m not sure if the structure of social media will allow quiet living like that—it feels like the medium is geared towards subsuming everything into a grand narrative—but it does seem like a worthwhile aspiration.
Happy reading!
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