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Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
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About This Book
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 she 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 technology fractures and reconstitutes our lives.
Reviews
"Hess does all of this without sharing a drop of advice—hallelujah."
"Very much a memoir—not a self-help or parenting book."
"Not mainly a medical odyssey but, rather, a mordant contemplation of the many screens...that reflected and mediated Hess's experience of pregnancy and early motherhood ..."
"Implicit in her story is the powerful, discomfiting argument that if we want to counter the excesses of this technology, we must first be honest about our dependence on it."
"With a reporter's gimlet eye, Hess lenses out from her personal experience."
"Early in the book—specifically the second half of page 32—she takes honesty too far, describing her bodily functions with such granular grubbiness as to leave the reader amazed and appalled."
"A captivating, charged, and crucially provocative consideration of motherhood in modern America."
"Parents will feel especially seen by this incisive and refreshing account."
"Hess' experiences would be most useful as a cautionary tale for new parents, especially those with high-risk pregnancies, whose insecurities provide fertile ground for online profiteers seeking to exploit them."
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