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
it, whether or not they are a member of the WELL, the online
community platform hosting this two-week discussion.

For non-members, here's a short link for easy access to the public
version: <https://tinyurl.com/jezer-morton>.

The full public link is:
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/567/Kathryn-Jezer-Morton-The-S
tory-o-page01.html>.

Both links will take you to the first page of the public
conversation. If you are not a WELL member, we encourage you to
visit regularly as the discussion will expand across multiple pages.
Use the pager (dropdown menus at the top and bottom of the page) to
navigate through the conversation as it evolves.

Feel free to share these links on social media or with anyone who
might be interested.

While non-members cannot post directly, we welcome your comments and
questions. You can email them to inkwell (at) well.com, and we'll
post them here on your behalf.

If you're not a member of the WELL and would like to participate
in more discussions like this, consider joining the WELL:
<https://www.well.com/join/>. The WELL is an online community with
vibrant, thoughtful conversations on a wide range of topics--an
excellent alternative to the fast-paced, drive-by posting on social
media.

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." 
  

    
Kathryn, thank you for a fascinating book. I feel that, in some
ways, the book is less about social media, than about the way that
being a social influencer shapes your life. I say that, at least in
part, because my own experience with social media probably started
with the WELL and by the time I hit Facebook, my experience felt and
feels different from what you describe. But, I have also never been
remotely close to being a social media influencer, a role that I
feel predates social media by at least a century - I think of Louis
Bernays providing actresses with free cigarettes (well, paying them,
I suspect) to break down taboos and encourage women to smoke in
public. Or, his ads against "socialized medicine" when it was
proposed in California, and certainly continues through Tupperware
parties and the like (although I suspect that Tupperware has moved
online, if it survives, at all).

There are certainly lots of similarities, although also some
differences, as in what happens when someone remains a social
influencer for a long time and the need to live something other than
"flattened" time.

Does this make any sense?
  

    
Kathryn, I'm looking forward to this Q&A! I'm a very light user of
social media. But I've noticed that when I want to post something,
I'm usually copying from my diary entries and then making changes in
them to fit the conventions of social media. So clearly I'm
modifying a narrative for social media from something I wrote for my
own eyes. 

It's interesting to me what social media conventions are and how
they may be altering not just how I write in the outside world but
how I think about what I'm writing.
  

    
Hi Ari, I do know what you mean - the presence of people being paid
to influence others outside the traditional domain of "advertising"
has a long history. I think what's novel about social media is that
this "influencer logic" has escaped containment and now forms part
of the worldview of everyday people who are not, and never will be,
paid "influencers." I'm thinking about younger people - Gen Z and
younger - who adopt a default posture of influencer when trying to
impress others or fit in. Most of the people I spoke to in the book
are Gen X or Millennials and they often identified tropes and habits
of professional "influencers" in their own, ordinary-person way of
presenting themselves. If you think about this in the context of
media ecology a la Neil Postman, you start to see traces of the
medium itself in the way that people show up in their everyday
lives. 
  

    
The WELL doesn't allow anonymous accounts, and its founding
doctrine, "You Own Your Own Words," is really about
accountability: you stand behind what you post. 

Facebook has pushed for real identities too, most seriously when it
was trying to build payments and a cryptocurrency into the platform.
Chris Poole, who founded the infamous 4chan image board community,
argues the opposite, that online identity is prismatic and we become
different people depending on the tools and communities we're
using. 

Did the people you interviewed talk about keeping a "Finsta" or
running separate accounts for different sides of themselves, and
what did that tell you about whether we're the same person online
as we are offline?  

And why we might need the option to be someone different online than
we are in real life?
  

    
It's certainly true that lots of young people (especially girls? I
get a sense that for guys the path to enhanced follower-dom is
different) live their lives, in part, as proto-influencers. I
remember the grand-daughter of one of my wife's cousins being
especially diligent about documenting and uploading the mundane to
her dozen followers.
  

    
@jukevox, it's funny, I agree with both claims - that accountability
is essential for civil discourse in virtual spaces, and also,
identity is prismatic. Several people I spoke to had "finstas"
(Instagram accounts that are not associated with their name), and
they use them for a variety of reasons -- the most interesting being
to circumvent one algorithm in favor of a different one. Often,
people will keep a finsta where they search for/engage with a
specific interest area, and in that space they'll communicate with
people about that topic. One of the vagaries of algorithmic feeds is
that they serve you more of what they assume you like -- but many of
us have multifarious interests, more than an algorithm can seem to
accommodate or keep up with. Finstas allow people to silo their
interests/identities more easily. I know media professionals who
maintain finstas not to post as a different person, but simply to
expose themselves to different information environments, where they
might learn more about a given topic. 

I do think that our real life identities can accommodate all our
interests/identities, and that the maintenance of multiple accounts
online isn't some kind of sign of psychosis or disorder but really
just a way to manufacture an online environment that is as rich and
varied as the one we have out in the world. (A place like the Well
is designed to allow you to engage in as many of your interests as
you want without pigeonholing you, which is one of the many
affordances of this space that Instagram, for example, lacks.) 
  

    
One of the things that stuck out for me in the book is something
that I think you refer to as conservatism - that unchanging, "always
on" bubbly sharing of curated highlights. 

"Being under surveillance while we post has inhibited our ability to
tell stories about our wildest, most adventurous trips. Strangers'
apartments, dingy youth hostels with awkward sleeping arrangements,
unexpected encounters--none of this easily translates to visual
storytelling as we currently know it."

Again, I can see this being very true to people focusing on their
"personal brands."

But, I'm not sure that's what I see on the increasingly rare
occasions that I use Facebook, even given how much the algorithms
hide from me. What I notice most, I _think_ isn't the influencers,
but the one-way "attend this concert/buy this thing" posters, mixed
in with the (okay, curated) posts of things people want to
publicize, or in the case of immediate family and friend, share with
same. 

I'll occasionally post interesting things I see/do, for instance,
especially if I'm encouraging others to do the same (catch this
band, attend that demo).

I don't have the sense that the people you are writing about use
these the same way.

(I did spend more time on Facebook or Insta, but I just got tired of
wasting so much time trying to see what I wanted to see and losing
so consistently to what Facebook wanted me to see, nor could I keep
up with all the changes to settlings and the like).
  

    
Thanks Kathryn. The "finsta" as a way to swap one algorithm for
another is a great detail. People are building their own filters
because a single feed can't keep up with everything they care
about. 

Ari, your Facebook is interesting because it sounds like a
noticeboard: gigs, demos, things worth catching. Maybe that's a
different use from the one in the book, where people are narrating
their own lives.

So maybe a question for everyone reading along, including the
lurkers: what do you actually do on social media these days? Do you
tell stories about your life, promote things, watch quietly, or have
you mostly left? 

And if you left social media, what finally pushed you out?
  

    
My social media use is very limited compared to 12 or 15 years ago.
Sometimes I can't resist reading an author on Substack, and I seem
incapable of reading comments on Substack, Patreon, or a news
article without posting a comment of my own.

I have an Instagram handle that I almost never use; I used it last
summer when a friend had passed and I was asked to put on a memorial
and let people from our old Portland art scene know.

Facebook was a big, addictive problem for me. When I moved away from
Portland in 2016, I started a finsta-ish second account for a bland,
nonpolitical version of myself that could become Facebook friends
with my many Christian cousins and people in the small town I'd
moved to. Though I knew all about social media algorithms blah blah
(I thought)...) It was very startling to live with these two very
different worlds in the form of feeds. My normal/old self's feed was
provocative but nightmarish. My neutral new self seemed to be living
in a nice world.

Between that and the 2016 election... taking a deep personal,
meditative dive into the role "my side" played in dividing the
nation and making Trump I happen... I was ready to quit. Hopefully.

and then reading Jaron Lanier's "Ten Arguments for Deleting Your
Social Media Accounts Right Now" which was so perfect, in addition
to having such a hilarious title, I literally went around and closed
down all my accounts everywhere, even my LinkedIn account with all
its fantastic testimonials.

The Well, though? Been on here since 1992. Took six months off in
the early 2000s and scribbled (deleted) about 90% of everything I'd
typed here over the decade. Then came back.
  

    
I've dropped back into Facebook a few times, first one for the
Facebook virtual deathbed vigil of Frank Miles, formerly (miles)
here on The Well (jukebox and I have camped with miles at Burning
Man, etc). Or to find a particular person I can't find any other way
-- not for fun, but for troubling reasons, such as a mutual friend
going insane.

There is always a chance I'll get addicted again or start posting,
especially in challenging conversations.

Oh and Reddit! I've had a couple Reddit accounts over the last four
years, and had to delete them because of yes, addiction, but also
that feeling of getting hooked into stupid arguments for no good
reason. That feeling pisses me off. Had it on Facebook, too. Still
have it on The Well sometimes! 
  

    
While other people check in with their social habits, some stats for
context:

There are about 5.8 billion social media accounts worldwide, with
the typical person on six or seven platforms. 
- Meta's apps reach 3.6 billion people a day. Facebook and
Instagram each have around 3 billion monthly users. YouTube about
2.7 billion.  TikTok roughly 2 billion.  Further down, Reddit has
about 130 million daily visitors (most of them logged out), Snapchat
493 million daily, X somewhere around 450 to 590 million depending
on who's counting, and Nextdoor 23 million weekly. 

DataReportal counts about 5.79 billion social media user identities
worldwide as of April 2026, around 70% of the world's population
and 95% of internet users.  
https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2026-global-overview-report

Social media, as Kathyrn's book title suggests, is where a huge part
of the world is telling their stories. 

Still very curious to hear from others here about how it fits into
their own lives.
  

    
Well, I've been along for the whole ride, blogging before it was
called blogging, joining social networks from SixDegrees onward,
microblogging when Twitter appeared. Various apps along the way. I
currently have presences on Facebook, Reddit, X, Mastodon, Bluesky,
Discord, LinkedIn et al. Several email accounts, as well. I spend
more time on the WELL than any of those others. It doesn't feel like
an addiction to me, just leveraging what's available to try to make
sense of the world and get shit done. 

I could have had more of a presence on social media, but I was too
busy and probably too fragmented, not picking one space. Currently I
have a podcast and a Substack blog, and those get a lot of my
attention, since I'm "retired" (i.e. not having to hustle).

Around '91 or '92 Paco Nathan and I started a company called
FringeWare with the idea that we would find people who had wares to
sell but couldn't figure out a way to get to market, and create a
way for them to sell those wares online. We created an email list,
originally with the intention of catalyzing conversations of
potential product providers, but that email list became a
subculture. We were finding the fringes. At the time you couldn't
accept credit cards online, so we realized we'd have to have a mail
order business instead, with a catalog. But we decided to start a
'zine, since we were in that world, and put the catalog in back.
Paco did all the heavy lifting (I had a day job). He built a
listserve for our list, learned how to use Pagemaker to produce the
'zine, found most of the products and handled fulfillment. The only
way we could accept credit cars was to have a physical store, so we
set one up inside of New Bohemia, a place that sublet to retailers.
My first "blog" was a kind of online magazine built into the
FringeWare site, called "TazMedia." We attracted all sorts of fringe
elements... though Alex Jones was attracting the darker forces.

FringeWare should've persisted but it didn't, a long story not worth
telling. But we were in the middle of the Internet culture of the
moment back in the early '90s, and social really was social. There
were coherent conversations happening on email lists, on Usenet,
definitely on the WELL, and we carried some of those conversations.
When microblogging appeared via Twitter, it seemed like a cool way
to toss ideas into the mix. Actually for me the first use was to
coordinate meetings. It was a strain to make it anything like
conversational, yet it started evolving as a system for drive-by
posting, tossing stuff out into feeds that were broad and shallow.
Meanwhile Facebook took the social networking online idea and turned
it into a way to exploit users, selling their attention to
advertisers. Twitter tried to figure out how to do that, as well,
but I don't think it worked as well in that environment. 

User-generated content was eventually called "social media" by
marketing and PR people who were trying to figure out how to make
their thing work in the increasingly fragmented and user-generated
space - mindshare was moving from magazines and newspaper to these
social spaces, and the marketing world wanted to understand how to
capture their big share of that attention. I found myself giving
talks about the new social media to marketing and PR people, because
of my experience, and pissing them off because I was so
anti-marketing. I came from an online community perspective,
thinking about how to sustain meaningful and productive
conversations online, and resistant to the idea that the folks in
these conversations were primarily valuable as targets for marketing
messages (which incidentally could be personalized based on
surveillance).

I think what's happened over time is that, primarily because of the
influence of the sales and marketing crowd, a lot of social media
has become parasocial media, following the broadcast model that
worked well to sell widgets. Social intent has become social
mutation.  We had imagined, at FringeWare, that we were building a
"street market in cyberspace," that the buyers and sellers could
also be parts of a meaningful community, but what we have now isn't
that.  Which is not to say that people aren't finding ways to
leverage the available tools for authentic community and social
experience. 
  

    
Kathryn, 

I'd like to ask about the stories we tell in private. 

A lot of the conversation that used to happen on Facebook seems to
have moved into WhatsApp groups, Snapchat and other group chats,
where the audience is a dozen friends or family members instead of
everyone we've ever met. 

Did that shift come up in your interviews, and do the stories people
tell in those smaller spaces look different from the ones they post
publicly?
  

    
Absolutely - it's a completely different form of storytelling. Most
people I spoke to said some version of, "the truth happens in my
group chat". Most people, at this point, fully accept that there are
distinct personas, public and private, and most of what we see in
public is motivated by something ulterior - either the management of
impression, or the seeking of attention, or provoking people in one
way or another. What we do over text message is intimate and private
-- and isn't usually subject to quite so many competing social
objectives.

It's interesting to me that our social media feeds are scraped for
data which is used by brands to develop future products and to
create ads, but in a sense, all that data is sort of bullshit -- the
real stuff, the actual honesty, has come to be hidden. So there's an
extent to which all that data is a ruse. 
  

    
Kathryn, thank you for two weeks of generous, thoughtful answers.
And thanks to everyone who joined in, including the lurkers.

For anyone who wants more, Kathryn's book is The Story of Your
Life:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/768019/the-story-of-your-life-by-kath
ryn-jezer-morton/

She also writes the biweekly "Brooding" column at The Cut:
https://www.thecut.com/author/kathryn-jezer-morton/

One last question to close. Social platforms have a poor record for
longevity and very little user loyalty. Friendster, MySpace and
Tumblr's heyday are gone, and people like Caitlin Moran are now
mourning the old Twitter. 

The WELL has run for more than 40 years, with an audience that has
aged along with it. How long do you think the individual platforms
will last, and will social media as a phenomenon outlast all of
them? 

What would it take for a network to last as long as the Well has?