IRL Audiobook By Chris Stedman cover art

IRL

Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives

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IRL

By: Chris Stedman
Narrated by: Kyle Scudder
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About this listen

What Does "IRL" (in real life) really mean in today's digital age?

It's easy and reflexive to view our online presence as fake and to see the internet as a space we enter when we aren't living our real, offline lives. Yet, so much of who we are and what we do now happens online, making it hard to know which parts of our lives are real.

IRL, Chris Stedman's personal and searing exploration of authenticity in the digital age, shines a light on how age-old notions of realness - who we are and where we fit in the world - can be freshly understood in our increasingly online lives. Stedman offers a different way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves: the internet and social media are new tools for understanding and expressing ourselves, and the not-always-graceful ways we use these tools can reveal new insights into far older human behaviors and desires.

IRL invites listeners to consider how we use the internet to fulfill the essential human need to feel real - a need many of us once met in institutions, but now seek to do on our own, online - as well as the ways we edit or curate ourselves for digital audiences. The digital search for meaning and belonging presents challenges, Stedman suggests, but also myriad opportunities to become more fully human. In the end, he makes a bold case for embracing realness in all of its uncertainty, online and off, even when it feels risky.

©2020 Broadleaf Books (P)2020 Broadleaf Books
Content Creation & Social Media Popular Culture Sociology Internet
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We’ve lived on our phones the last year+ 10/10

Stedman writes with such personal authenticity that the subject matter of our digital age feels deeply universal to the core of our human experience. And he’s funny. navigating realness through a queer lens, and meaning in the semi inconclusive conclusion, I laughed and even cried throughout. Stedman thoughtfully pulls from pop culture, academia, and personal experience in such an emotionally accessible way. Having survived over a year of plague, wherein our digital selves have had to navigate the majority of our realness, identity, and meaning, this book must certainly resonate with a majority of its readers. At least for me; I’ve read it twice now. Highly recommend for anyone who does or does not pay attention to their weekly screen time reports. Can’t recommend enough to someone who enjoys a deeply personal read.

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