A conversation is overheard between two people; one congratulates the other on their success, evident through countless posts on LinkedIn, but the other confesses the prolific aggrandizement is due to slumping success.<\/p>\n
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A conversation is overheard between two people; one congratulates the other on their success, evident through countless posts on LinkedIn, but the other confesses the prolific aggrandizement is due to slumping success.<\/p>\n
A conversation is overheard between two people; one congratulates the other on their success, evident through countless posts on LinkedIn, but the other confesses the prolific aggrandizement is due to slumping success.<\/p>\n
A young man on an airplane spends three hours poring over selfies taken on a vacation, zooming in on his biceps and using AI to retouch photos before posting on Instagram.<\/p>\n
Anonymous and cowardly trolls on Reddit attempt to end another person\u2019s career.<\/p>\n
All this \u201cstorytelling\u201d was observed in one day by this reviewer.<\/p>\n
The practice and art of storytelling is embedded into who we are as a species. Stories are our memory, our way of understanding the universe, a way to explain the unexplainable. Through poems, songs, the drum, film, photographs, dance, ancient drawings in caves, books and now social media, we are perpetually scratching on the walls in an attempt to make sense of lives and connect with others.<\/p>\n
But what happens when storytelling is eroded? What happens when the art of storytelling becomes a myriad of lies, self promotion, petty grievances and a race to claim \u201cI am OK, and probably better than you?\u201d<\/p>\n
Montreal-based writer Kathyrn Jezer-Morton, in an expansion of her doctoral thesis, seeks to answer this question in her latest, The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. Born from her research on momfluencers (this reviewer learned a new word), the former Vermont commune member turned Concordia grad student hit the road to speak with social media users all over North America to get a sense of what compels many to spend their lives on platforms controlled by oligarchs, manipulated by algorithms and sanitized by our need to conform to something that doesn\u2019t really exist \u2014 perfection.<\/p>\n
Jezer-Moton, a self-admitted user of social media, takes the reader through history and the connection between neoliberalism, capitalism and our need to showcase our progress \u2014 as in things are getting better, bigger and more successful. In The Story of Your Life, she specifically highlights how, over the past two decades, social media has transformed from a platform where we simply say things about our lives to a full focus on personal branding. Social media, for Jezer-Morton, has changed how we think and speak about ourselves.<\/p>\n
Using weddings, our vacations, our families, our homes and our bodies as examples, Jezer-Morton\u2019s inquiry posits that we have lost the ability to create a bona fide narrative about ourselves. Rather, as she argues, our stories on social media have become \u201call light and no shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n
We are coerced into a culture based on a \u201ccelebration of compliance,\u201d where we covet the perfect kitchen and the perfect kids all while exclaiming to the world, as the author suggests, that \u201cWe Do S\u2013t!\u201d<\/p>\n
Jezer-Morton\u2019s angst and lament is not simply about screen time, but rather that we are losing our ability to both just be \u2014 to accept that life does not have to have linear projection \u2014 and to tell legitimate stories free of \u201cshowing off, exaggeration, or even lying.\u201d As she argues, social media has created the conditions for the loss of our humanity and our understanding of how we process it: \u201cCreating perfect images has become not just a hobby but an entire value system,\u201d she notes.<\/p>\n