The Story of Your Life

An eye-opening look at how social media shapes the stories we tell and the lives we lead.

Over the past two decades, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have revolutionized how we document and share our lives. Gone are the days of physical photo albums and handwritten journals. Now, a 15-second reel or a photo dump can capture our most significant moments.

In The Story of Your Life, journalist and New York magazine columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton examines how these algorithm-driven platforms not only change the way we share information, but also shape the content itself. What stories do we choose to tell, and how do these choices reflect and shape our evolving identities?

Through rigorous research and engaging interviews, Jezer-Morton explores how the platforms on which we have told our life stories for the past twenty years have determined what those stories have come to look and sound like. Whether we prefer to admit it or not, social media is where our history lives now, and the platforms have shaped how that history is told. Today, our attention spans are short, and our stories reflect that, as do the types of events that we consider worth sharing about. By examining how we share, talk, and post about our milestones, vacations, homes, relationships, hardships, politics, and more online, Jezer-Morton shows just how pervasive and influential our social media platforms have become in how we view ourselves, and what we deem important for living a good life.

Smart, funny, and sharply observant, The Story of Your Life delivers a deeply rigorous and revealing look at how we present ourselves online and off and offers us a fresh perspective on just how profoundly social media is shaping the very arc of our lives.