Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Inkwell welcomes Kathryn Jezer-Morton, author of "The Story of Your
Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything."
Kathryn is the author of the biweekly "Brooding" column at The
Cut, in which she explores topics surrounding modern family life.
She has written about domestic life and digital culture for the New
York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, and Jezebel, among many other
publications. She holds a PhD in sociology from Concordia University
and lives with her partner and two children in Montreal.
<https://www.thecut.com/author/kathryn-jezer-morton/>

In "The Story of Your Life," Kathryn examines how algorithm-driven
platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok change the way we
share information, and how we shape the content we share as we
dcoument our personal histories on our platforms of choice.
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/768019/the-story-of-your-life-by-kath
ryn-jezer-morton/>
  

    
Leading the conversation is Matthew Hawn. Matthew (jukevox on the
WELL) has worked in digital media since the early 90s, from
journalism at Macworld Online and the launches of MSNBC and ZDTV to
a few decades in music and digital media across Europe and Asia. He
now runs the consultancy Compass, Map & Key and creates immersive,
location-based theatre games on the side.
<https://compassmapandkey.com/>
  

    
Welcome, Kathryn, and hello everyone.

Kathryn, I'm glad to be hosting this conversation about _The Story
of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience
Everything_. I'm excited to dig into the topics you explore,
especially how your PhD research in sociology and your
"Brooding" column for The Cut at New York Magazine have shaped
the book.

To get us started: where did the book begin for you? Did the idea
grow out of your academic research, or from what you were seeing as
a columnist writing about parenting?
  

    
Hi Matthew, and thanks to the Well for the invitation to take part
in this Q and A. 

I began thinking about what would become this book way back in the
early 2000s when I first began using Friendster and then Facebook,
when I was in college. Pretty much as soon as I began using those
tools I could perceive in myself a change in how I was narrating my
experience. I was aware that I was doing something -- not
necessarily fake or fully inauthentic, but different -- and I
couldn't quite figure out what it was. It was this highly
self-conscious public storytelling that felt historically novel. 

I went on to do a PhD in sociology and I focused on "momfluencers"
(mom influencers), because in the context of a PhD study you need a
very well defined group to study. But what I really wanted to do was
talk more broadly about how social media is changing the way we talk
about ourselves. That was too big a topic to corral into an academic
study, so I waited until after I'd finished the PhD and then pitched
this idea to trade publishers, where I would have more freedom to
follow this idea. 
  

    
One of the things that struck me as I read the book was that your
take is a generous and balanced one that really explores both the
positive and negative elements of social media. This is not a
jeremiad about the evils of social media but a thoughtful and
curious look at how it's changing the way we tell stories about
ourselves.   

How has your personal view of social media changed after researching
and writing the book?  In particular, I know you have teenagers now
and I wonder how writing the book has shifted the way you approach
it with them?
  

    
I really did not think the world needed another book about how
social media is bad for us. I think this is something we're all very
up-to-speed on. I think what is not as often discussed is actually
what we are doing when we use it, and how that behavior is or is not
significant in the long term. To find that out I had to talk to
people, in person, which meant establishing trust and rapport with
strangers. Another motivation I had working just under the surface
was that I wanted to resist the sort of hyperbolic, reactionary
thinking and writing that social media itself has normalized. I
wanted to get back to a way of thinking and writing that is much
more open and deliberative, because I thought it would make for a
better book and also because I wanted to give myself that sort of
intellectual project and challenge. Turns out listening to strangers
and giving them the benefit of the doubt is very fun! 

As far as my own teens -- they are really not interested in social
media, probably because it's something I write about so much. To
them it's just lame across the board. I am lucky in this regard. But
in general, I discourage my kids from using it on principle. I think
there's no reason to expose yourself to social media until you're an
adult, ideally. And, to be clear, I both love social media and I
think it deeply sucks. My feelings about it are complicated and
there's a lot of contradictions baked in.
  

    
The table of contents was my first clue that you were taking a
different approach to social media. Plenty of books catalogue the
harms we inflict on each other online, or that Mark Zuckerberg and
his minions have unleashed on us.

 Early on you write that "Storytelling is a two-way street that
runs between our imaginations and the cultural material surrounding
us," and you quote the psychologist Dan McAdams: "Selves create
stories, which create new selves." 

The chapters seem to follow from that idea, organised around the
kinds of stories we tell each other on these platforms:
"Celebrations," "Lies," "Politics," "Grievance," and
my favourite, near the end, "Resonance." 

Can you say more about your choice to shape the book around types of
stories rather than around the platforms themselves or the harms
they cause?
  

    
It was really a natural outgrowth of my research orientation, which
was informed by ethnography -- how do people make use of these
tools, and how do they use them to make meaning in their lives?
Really I'm just interested in what ordinary people have to say. So,
as I gathered information in interviews, these themes emerged. Also,
I really wasn't that interested in digging deep into the political
economy of the platforms themselves, partly because that's just not
really my area of expertise, but also because it's hard to get
people from Meta/X/etc to go on the record about how their
algorithms are designed to work. 

But also, I had my own thoughts that I wanted to untangle, apart
from the interviews I did (for example, in the "Resonance" chapter
where I'm really trying to get to the bottom of what feeling I'm
chasing when I'm posting to social media). I wanted the book to be
more about emotions that you might expect from a book about
technology. Because technology is very emotional but we don't tend
to talk about that side so much. 
  

    
Pardon the interruption, but here's some essential information about
this discussion...

This conversation is publicly accessible, meaning anyone can read
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For non-members, here's a short link for easy access to the public
version: <https://tinyurl.com/jezer-morton>.

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tory-o-page01.html>.

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This conversation will continue for at least two weeks, through
November 2. Thanks for being part of it!
  

    
Let's talk about some of the interviews for the book. 

What surprised or intrigued you most about how your interviewees
talked about their use of social media?

I assume you connected with some of them via social media to set-up
your conversations.  Did their personalities and stories in
interviews match their online personalities and stories?  
  

    
For at least half of the interviews in the book, I didn't connect
with people via social media, but through word of mouth, basically I
used the "snowball" method where I'd ask everyone I spoke to if
there was anyone they could put me in touch with, and just kept
going like that. This was by design because I didn't want my
interviews to be limited to people within my own social media silo. 

What surprised me most was how much thought people were giving,
mostly privately, to their own social media use. People had a lot to
say, a lot of observations and remarks that it seemed like they had
been pondering for a while. In some cases, people told me that
they'd never discussed their social media use with anyone before,
and it felt strange but also cathartic in a couple of instances for
people to do so. To ask someone, "so, why did you post that? What
were you thinking, what was your objective?" -- this is really not
done, socially. It would seem very confrontational to demand that
someone explain themselves in this way. But also, why is that? Why
can't we talk about what we post, and reflect on the personae we're
projecting? These are interesting questions to get people to think
about. By breaching that social protocol and inviting people to just
openly talk about it, I felt like I was getting at something just
under the surface for a lot of people. 

I'd say that one thing that united everyone I spoke to was that they
were all very aware of the artifice of social media use, and they
mostly were very comfortable implicating themselves in the
production of this artifice. No one was saying, "Listen, everyone
else is a huge phony, except me."