Second Life

In her work writing about the internet and popular culture, Amanda Hess has illuminated the collapse between the artificial and the real, investigating a culture obsessed with authenticity even as it sells simulacrums of experience that subsume experience itself. Never did this feel more true than when she became pregnant, and immediately found herself targeted by apps, gadgets, bloggers, online forums and advertisers, telling her what she should do, how she should feel, and that her new life (and by extension, her child's) would be so much better if she bought a luxury linen maternity dress for 210. And then, at her seven-month scan, the doctor analysing the ultrasound saw something he 'didn't like' - a potentially serious abnormality in her baby. Telling the moving story of this moment and everything that happened afterwards, Amanda Hess explores how it feels to become a parent in a culture in which everything is mediated by the internet; asks fascinating questions about the tension between nature and the artificial; and asks how it might be possible to find some shelter amid technology's unforgiving landscape.