Overview

“Second Life is not only a book for parents; it's for anyone intrigued (and concerned) by the ways in which our digital footprints impact the circle of life itself.” —Elle “Engrossing….With a reporter’s gimlet eye, Hess lenses out from her personal experience…[She] has a (hilariously reluctant) native’s ear for the (awful) millennial marketing sound.”  —The New York Times “[Hess probes] both the effect of the internet on maternal guilt and anxiety (a nearly universal condition) and the more specific challenges of her own motherhood journey….Smart, funny, and filled with love.” —The Boston Globe As an internet culture critic for The New York Times, Amanda Hess had built a reputation among readers as a sharp observer of the seductions and manipulations of online life. But when Hess discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she found herself unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis of her own. In the summer of 2020, a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality in Hess’s baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers. But rather than allaying her anxieties, her search sucked her into the destabilizing morass of the internet, and she was vulnerable—more than ever—to conspiracy, myth, judgment, commerce, and obsession. As Hess documents her escalating relationship with the digital world, she identifies how technologies act as portals to troubling ideologies, ethical conflicts, and existential questions, and she illuminates how the American traditions of eugenics, surveillance, and hyper-individualism are recycled through these shiny products for a new generation of parents and their children. At once funny, heartbreaking, and surreal, Second Life is a journey that spans a network of fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, “freebirth” influencers, and hospital reality shows. Hess confronts technology’s distortions as they follow her through pregnancy and into her son’s early life. The result is a critical record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.

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9780385549738

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Second Life is a tender, perceptive account of pregnancy and early motherhood—and a stylish confrontation with the demented landscape of digital parenting content. It also happens to be a subtle indictment of a healthcare system that leaves some parents scrolling for alternatives. Hess is a smart, savvy, and generous guide.” —Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley “There is no better writer than Amanda Hess to dissect the joys, fears, and humiliations that accompany having children in the information age, and no wittier chaperone through the strange world of surveillance, monetization, bureaucracy, and alternative medicine to which pregnant people and mothers are subjected. Second Life is a sharp, moving, sometimes harrowing, and always funny companion to some of the best and worst things life has to offer.” —Max Read, editor of Read Max and former editor-in-chief of Gawker “The story of a crisis-born odyssey, Second Life charts a new mother’s descent into and re-emergence from the internet’s 'pregnant underworld' with clarity, rigor, and tremendous wit. That such a deft a vivisector of our digital age should find herself lost in its churn of data-brokerage, commerce, and myth is a reminder of what we’re all up against, and an engine of Amanda Hess’s bracing and eloquent memoir.” —Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame

“The story of a crisis-born odyssey, Second Life charts a new mother’s descent into and re-emergence from the internet’s “pregnant underworld” with clarity, rigor, and tremendous wit. That such a deft a vivisector of our digital age should find herself lost in its churn of data-brokerage, commerce, and myth is a reminder of what we’re all up against, and an engine of Amanda Hess’s bracing and eloquent memoir.” --Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame

“Second Life is a tender, perceptive account of pregnancy and early motherhood—and a stylish confrontation with the demented landscape of digital parenting content. It also happens to be a subtle indictment of a healthcare system that leaves some parents scrolling for alternatives. Hess is a smart, savvy, and generous guide.” —Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley “The story of a crisis-born odyssey, Second Life charts a new mother’s descent into and re-emergence from the internet’s 'pregnant underworld' with clarity, rigor, and tremendous wit. That such a deft a vivisector of our digital age should find herself lost in its churn of data-brokerage, commerce, and myth is a reminder of what we’re all up against, and an engine of Amanda Hess’s bracing and eloquent memoir.” —Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame

Author Information

AMANDA HESS is a critic at large for The New York Times. She writes about internet and pop culture for the Arts section and con­tributes regularly to The New York Times Maga­zine. Hess has worked as an internet columnist for Slate magazine, an editor at Good magazine, and an arts and nightlife columnist at the Wash­ington City Paper, and has served as the second vice president for the NewsGuild of New York, a union representing media workers. She has also written for such publications as ESPN The Magazine, Wired, and Pacific Standard, where her feature on the online harassment of women won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest.

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