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$8.99
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
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Hardcover $8.99List price: $25.99 List Price This is the manufacturer's recommended retail price. Please note older versions of books may not reflect the most current list price due to price adjustments made on newer printings. We strive to keep the website's list price updated to match the current MSRP, based on information from publishers.
About
One of TIME Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
One of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025.
In the summer of 2020, when Amanda Hess was pregnant for the first time, a routine ultrasound screening detected a mysterious abnormality in her baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers online. But rather than allaying her anxieties, her search unleashed a destabilizing onslaught of data and technology, and she was vulnerable - more than ever - to conspiracy, myth, judgement, commerce and obsession.
In Second Life, Hess tells her deeply personal story of a pregnancy that falls outside the fêted category of 'normal'. But this is also a story about all of us. For as she made her way through a bizarre digital world of pregnancy apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, 'freebirth' influencers and hospital reality shows, Hess realised that ideas of eugenics, surveillance, ableism and hyper-individualism are being sold through shiny technologies to a new generation of parents.
At once funny, surreal and heartbreaking, Second Life asks compelling questions about how our most fundamental human experiences are fractured and reshaped by technology.
In the summer of 2020, when Amanda Hess was pregnant for the first time, a routine ultrasound screening detected a mysterious abnormality in her baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers online. But rather than allaying her anxieties, her search unleashed a destabilizing onslaught of data and technology, and she was vulnerable - more than ever - to conspiracy, myth, judgement, commerce and obsession.
In Second Life, Hess tells her deeply personal story of a pregnancy that falls outside the fêted category of 'normal'. But this is also a story about all of us. For as she made her way through a bizarre digital world of pregnancy apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, 'freebirth' influencers and hospital reality shows, Hess realised that ideas of eugenics, surveillance, ableism and hyper-individualism are being sold through shiny technologies to a new generation of parents.
At once funny, surreal and heartbreaking, Second Life asks compelling questions about how our most fundamental human experiences are fractured and reshaped by technology.
'Acutely empathetic, thoroughly researched, funny, irreverent and moving' Observer
'What a book! Has the lyricism and intelligence of a literary masterpiece, and the urgency of a thriller' Marianne Levy, author of Don't Forget to Scream
'So interesting, astute and beautifully crafted. I loved it' Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence
'What a book! Has the lyricism and intelligence of a literary masterpiece, and the urgency of a thriller' Marianne Levy, author of Don't Forget to Scream
'So interesting, astute and beautifully crafted. I loved it' Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence