Galaxy Brain: How Social Media Makes Our Lives Smaller - The Atlantic

Listen−1.0x+<br>Seek<br>0:0048:21

Most people spend more time than you think agonizing over their social-media posts. Kathryn Jezer-Morton wanted to understand their thinking—and when she dug deeper, she learned that redemption and optimization narratives are what the algorithm rewards, and therefore what drive the stories we tell. What does that mean for how we all think about ourselves? Charlie Warzel talks to Jezer-Morton about how authentic has become something different from true, and how people’s arcs on social media tend to point only upward.

The following is a transcript of the episode:<br>Kathryn Jezer-Morton: No one’s interested in scientific data as much as they’re interested in a really compelling anecdote. And this is just attention-economy stuff. This is because a really compelling anecdote is going to perform better for a number of reasons, whereas a big, longitudinal study is gonna have some interesting findings but it’s also gonna have some contradictory findings. Science is often much less, kind of, explosive than, like, this one dude who’s like, I took this supplement, and six months later, I am freaking jacked. You know, that’s cool.

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where, today, we’re going to answer a seemingly unanswerable question: How is social media changing the way we understand ourselves and even humanity as a whole?

By any account, I’ve been a somewhat prolific poster for at least two decades. Like most Millennials, I was a kid and high schooler in the pre-social-media days and went to college just as Facebook was taking off. This is partially why, as I’ve long argued, Millennials like myself are often uniquely tortured about social media: We’ve experienced it profoundly shaping our social lives, our culture, our politics, and ourselves, but we can also remember just enough of a time before it that we can see this process as something that was emergent. In other words, it’s not a given that our lives had to be mediated this way, by these massive platforms for viral advertising.

And so a few years ago, I was talking to another writer who is roughly around my age about what it’s meant to come of age in the attention economy. We talked about how fun and experimental all of this was at first, how exciting it was to be connected to everyone all at once. It was both intimate and incredibly public. But also about how quickly all the experimentation turned into something different; how we, without really even noticing it, began writing, posting, and performing—all for this imagined audience. And how we started imagining how that imagined audience would respond. How we’d see people get mocked or shamed or lavished with praise and internalize all of that in the back of our minds. How the way we spoke changed on specific platforms as the result of in-jokes, memes, and a shared culture that everyone was building at once.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though there are countless examples of the way that social media curdles people or pushes us to be the most neurotic, reactive, and uncharitable versions of ourselves. All these versions once felt separate from our actual selves, but over time they’ve become harder to untangle.

This is the subject of a new book by the writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton, titled The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. Jezer-Morton, argues that social media’s greatest influence might be how we understand ourselves as humans and not, as many critics have argued, its impact on attention spans or our politics. Humans are storytellers and always have been. And those stories help us understand the world and our place in it. I was drawn to Jezer Morton’s book in part because of her framing of social media: as a place where all of us who post are telling a collective story about what it means to be a person in today’s world.

In some sense, this is all obvious enough. But what’s less clear is what these platforms and stories are doing to all of us, whether you share your life on social media or you just lurk there. Are they making us more unique or more the same? What is highlighted in a culture that is mediated by algorithms, and what lived experiences are excluded? If social media is the lens through which we capture the story of our lives, is the aperture being widened or narrowed? Jezer-Morton brings a nuance to this polarizing topic, and she joins me now to talk about it all.

Warzel: Kathryn, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: Thank you, Charlie.

Warzel: So your book is about social media, but it’s really about how we make sense of ourselves and the world through personal stories. And so I wanted to start with you telling me just a bit about your own personal story growing up on a commune in Vermont and specifically how you feel that shaped your understanding of personal and communal narratives and how it’s...