Second Life

I remember when the game Second Life came out, and wondering why anyone would want to live an entire life virtually--create an avatar and interact with other users around the globe in an artificial setting? It didn't seem like the future in 2003, and yet it seems rather quaint in 2015, a time when everything, if not everyone, is online. Trolls are unmasked, poachers are hounded, sex tapes are leaked, accounts are hacked--nowadays the idea of maintaining an Internet persona discrete from one offline requires secret agent-like ability to mask one's identity. It seems no matter who you are or what you're doing, the Internet knows. It will find you.

Many writers have shown us dark futures of digital surveillance--George Orwell (1984) and Dave Eggers (The Circle), for starters--all seemingly mapped from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, with its Panoptical observation methods of chastisement. Recently, Jon Ronson researched the social tendency of Internet mobs to penalize those who misbehave, and wrote So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Riverhead, $27.95), a reasoned resource for understanding, avoiding or coping with the pitchforks and torches. And in July, Joshua Mohr published All This Life (Soft Skull, $25), a comic novel of modern ennui that features social media more closely resembling the Internet we live with today than that of dour dystopian speculations.

All This Life follows several Bay Area characters whose lives intersect online as their paths offline also veer toward one another. Through YouTube, Twitter, smart phones and the leak of an intimate video, real life butts against the digital world as witnesses to a traumatic event attempt to make sense of it. Mohr isn't interested in the potentially catastrophic extreme of future Internet machinations. Instead, All This Life is a compassionate, thoughtful characterization of how our first and second lives are inextricably linked, right now. The result is no less thrilling, but so much more hopeful. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

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