Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

“Second Life is not only a book for parents; it's for anyone intrigued (and concerned) by the ways in which our digital footprints impact the circle of life itself.”
—Elle

“Engrossing….With a reporter’s gimlet eye, Hess lenses out from her personal experience…[She] has a (hilariously reluctant) native’s ear for the (awful) millennial marketing sound.” 
—The New York Times

“[Hess probes] both the effect of the internet on maternal guilt and anxiety (a nearly universal condition) and the more specific challenges of her own motherhood journey….Smart, funny, and filled with love.”
—The Boston Globe

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 Hess 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 our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.