[currently reading]
đź“š Insights from Reading Second Life by Amanda Hess
- The Internet creates a false sense of intimacy, especially during pregnancy.
- ChatGPT and AI expand the terrain of surveillance into emotional life.
- The erosion of privacy may be reshaping how we behave.
For many women, especially in the early stages of pregnancy, the Internet becomes their main source of connection, validation, and information. But that intimacy is transactional. Platforms obsess over your body, your choices, your purchases—until your data becomes less profitable. Then you’re dropped. It’s a brief period of feeling “seen,” but it’s not care—it’s surveillance wrapped in the illusion of concern. That loneliness, paired with the manipulative design of digital platforms, creates a cycle of dependence and abandonment that can feel quietly devastating.
Unlike search engines or static content, AI chat tools invite you to narrate your interior world. You’re not just asking questions—you’re engaging in reflective, often therapeutic dialogue. This opens up new privacy risks we don’t yet understand, because we’re volunteering intimate information under the guise of personal utility. The boundary between “private” and “public” becomes blurrier when the tool is not just a search engine but a companion, a mirror, and an interpreter.
Rather than fighting for the return of privacy, we may be evolving to care less about it. In a world where everything is recorded or scraped, where your child’s face is already online before they speak, perhaps people adapt by becoming more transparent—or numb. What begins as survival in a surveillance culture could slowly alter the baseline of what feels normal or worth protecting, leading us to live lives with fewer secrets and more exposure, not by choice, but by force of environment.
🗣️ Insights from the Book Club Conversation
- If a child’s life is big enough, tech becomes proportionally small.
- Your own media diet is part of parenting.
- Offline relationships filter the noise and shape what you believe.
Technology takes up the most space in lives that feel small or constrained. When a child is fulfilled—when they have embodied experiences, meaningful relationships, and enough stimulation—the pull of the screen is far weaker. It’s not the most exciting thing they have. That’s something parents can offer, not just through restriction, but through expansion. The same was true for adults during the pandemic: as our real lives shrank, our screen lives swelled. The solution might not be less tech, but more life.
Parents often focus on managing their child’s screen time without reflecting on their own. But your digital boundaries, habits, and content consumption become a model, and they set the emotional tone of the home. At the book club, people were moved to audit their own tech use after reading Hess’s work, experimenting with muting, pruning, and being more mindful. You realized you already practice some version of this—and it might be worth naming and sharing. It’s a system of care as much as anything else.
One thing that stood out about Amanda Hess’s book is how absent real-life friendships seemed in her narrative. When you don’t have trusted human sources of information, the online world feels louder and more definitive—volume becomes mistaken for truth. That’s why having a village still matters, especially in parenting but really for anyone navigating a noisy digital world. When you’re grounded in relationship, the Internet becomes a resource—not an oracle. The human filter changes everything.