Social Media's Influence on Our Lives

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. So think about the last thing you posted. Maybe a photo dump from a vacation, a birthday tribute, a graduation. You probably gave at least a little thought to the caption, right? What to include, what to leave out, how it would land.
Most of us have been doing some version of this for 20 years now, if you're that old, and yet we almost never talk about it. My next guest spent years asking strangers all over the country about their posting habits, and many told her they had never once discussed them out loud. But her argument goes further than how we post. She says social media has changed not just our attention spans or how isolated people sometimes feel or the way we get our news. We're always talking about those things.
But also how we vacation, how we celebrate, how we parent, and how we tell the stories of our own lives. So with me now is Kathryn Jezer-Morton. You may know her best as a parenting columnist for New York Magazine. Her really interesting column in New York Magazine is The Cut, called Brooding. Now she's got a book called The Story of Your Life, How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. Kathryn, welcome back to WNYC.

**Kathryn Jezer-Morton** (1:25)
Thank you so much, Brian.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:27)
So write to that word experience in your subtitle, not just how we tell the stories, but how we experience our lives?

**Kathryn Jezer-Morton** (1:34)
Yeah. I mean, that's what I found in my conversations with people, is that we see these stories when we're scrolling, and it influences the way that we then reflect back on our own experiences, and then the types of experiences that we want to have, and that we seek out because we're thinking, well, I want to replicate this thing that I saw on social media, for example.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:57)
Listeners, maybe you lived, if you're old enough, at a time before social media, or before social media was ubiquitous, and you've seen a change in how you experience things in your life, compared to before you started posting about them. If anybody has a story like that, call in and tell it, or you can call in with anything relevant and ask a question for Kathryn Jezer-Morton, her new book, The Story of Your Life, How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.
Call or you can text, of course, as well. I'm going to ask you to talk about what would we call it, a prelude or the prequel to this book that you revealed because long before you even had a Facebook account, you were writing in collective journals on your Vermont commune. Everyone's lives were recorded in one shared book in the kitchen. You lived on a commune?

**Kathryn Jezer-Morton** (3:01)
Yeah. My dad and his friends founded a commune in the late 60s, and that's where I spent a big part of my childhood. Yeah, we had these notebooks that would be just out on the coffee table or on the counter, and people would write in them whatever they wanted.
I loved that. I was a kid, I was in fifth, sixth grade, and I just loved reading everyone's little entries, and then you could comment on people's entries, and then they might come back and reply to you. It was like a proto social media technology.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:34)
Was that, in a way, your first social media feed?

**Kathryn Jezer-Morton** (3:37)
I would say that it was, looking back, and I really took to it. I just loved it. I think a lot of people, when they started using social media, when it became widespread in the early 2000s, it was really fun. And I remember finding it just super, you know, I just, I wanted to do it. I wanted to participate.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:55)
Do you feel differently today, just with respect to your own life?

**Kathryn Jezer-Morton** (3:59)
I do.
Yeah. I've become, I mean, I still use it all the time. But I'm a lot more ambivalent about it. And I don't, I would not say that I find it fun. No.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:08)
Well, you do call social media your hobby. And, you know, most of us probably don't think of our use of social media that way. Hobbies are knitting or playing badminton, I don't know.
Why do you call it a hobby?

**Kathryn Jezer-Morton** (4:22)
I call it a hobby because we've been doing it for so long and for so many hours that you just develop an expertise in it. I think, and this is one of the things that I found in talking to people is that people have a lot of very nuanced opinions and kind of practices and ways of looking at it that are developed over years. And they don't necessarily think of it as expertise. But anything that you're doing for this many hours, you develop a set of practices that constitutes a kind of expertise.