Review: The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us

Published Categorised as Writings, Book Reviews

The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us
The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us by Nora Young
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I took this out of the library, and it expired when I was about halfway through. There’s a long hold list for it, and no wonder. Hopefully, I won’t have completely forgotten what I’ve read by the time I can check it out again … but I suspect I’ll have to start from the beginning again. That may be a good thing.

I had trouble getting into it at first. It wasn’t the writing — Nora Young writes as she talks on her CBC radio show Spark. It’s engaging and colloquial. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t sure where she was going. It was in chapter four that I started to understand how the book was threaded together.

There are some really interesting concepts in here, concepts that require pondering not a fast read-through (though the style of writing encourages the latter), concepts like what does it mean to self-track to our identities and our physical bodies, like how will we deal with copyright issues versus our need for inevitable whole-life tracking.

Anyway, I look forward to getting back into it. (P.S., I don’t rate books I haven’t finished.)

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