In Real Life: Love, Lies, and Identity in the Digital Age

In Real Life: Love, Lies, and Identity in the Digital Age      

          To begin this online assignment, I started by looking on Amazon.com for books with the term “digital age.”  I choose this term to search because of my interest in the digital technologies in todays network society.  Many books relating to business, teaching, and parenting in today’s new society came up from this search.  Even though these weren’t of interest to me, I did find many interesting books available to choose from. The three books I researched were, Media & Culture: Mass communication in a Digital Age by Richard Campbell, Christopher Martin, and Bettina Fabos, In Real Life: Love, Lies, and Identity in the Digital Age by Nev Schulman, and Digital Media and Society: An Introduction by Adrian Athique.  I then searched these books on many websites such as, World Cat, Google Books, and Library Thing.  After doing this and seeing reviews or lack there of for these books, I chose to read In Real Life: Love, Lies, and Identity in the Digital Age by Nev Schulman.  This book was written by the creator and star of the MTV show Catfish, which follows stories of people who have online relationships with people who may not be who they are saying they are.  I have seen this show on TV from time to time and this is and interesting topic that has developed due to the digital communication devices we have today.  This book was rated 4/5 stars and had many amazon reviews. Most reviewers said that is was a very interesting and relatable read.  Although this was said to be more of an easy read than the others, I think this book seems very interesting and something I would enjoy reading.  World Cat found this book in only 2 libraries and did not provide any subject classifications.  Google Books showed that it has 21 reviews by readers, all who seemed to enjoy the book.  The other books I researched did not have any reviews on this platform. Library Thing also did not have reviews for any of these books, but In Real Life: Love, Lies, and Identity in the Digital Age had the highest popularity number and was in the most peoples libraries compared to the other two.  Then when I looked up the book on ProQuest and Project Muse, I did not find any scholarly reviews or articles about the book, however, there were many magazine articles written about the author.