It’s easy and reflexive to view our online presence as fake, to see the internet as a space we enter when we aren’t living our real, offline lives. And yet, so much of who we are and what we do now happens online. Social media is becoming less somewhere we go and more a place in which we are simply always present. All of it makes 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 can be freshly understood in our new online lives. Stedman argues for a different way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves: far from being unnatural, the internet is simply one more tool for understanding and expressing ourselves, and the way we use it can reveal new insights into far older human behaviors and desires. IRL invites readers to consider the ways they edit or curate themselves for digital audiences, and in the end makes a bold case for authenticity, even when it feels risky.