Review: Unfriending My Ex (and Other Things I'll Never Do) by Kim Stolz

Title: Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do
Author: Kim Stolz
Publisher/Publication Date: Scribner; June 24, 2014
Genre: Nonfiction
Source/Format: Purchased; Hardcover

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Synopsis from Goodreads...

An incisive, hilarious, and brutally honest memoir about life online and about how our obsessive connectivity is making us more disconnected;from former reality show contestant, MTV VJ, restauranteur, and go-to voice for millenials...

Social media and technology have fundamentally altered the way we do business, couple and break up, develop friendships, and construct our identities and our notions of aspiration and fame. We make decisions about where we'll go based on whether it's Instagrammable. We don't have friends, we have followers. For an entire generation, an experience not captured on social media might as well not have happened at all.

As someone whose identity has been forged by reality TV (as a contestant on America's Next Top Model) and social media and mobile technology, Kim Stolz is deeply obsessed with the subject. She has a hard time putting her phone down. And yet she remembers what life was like before technology-induced ADD, before life had become a string of late-night texts, Snapchats, endless selfies, that sinking feeling you get when you realize you've hit reply all by mistake. It's hard to imagine now, but there was once a time before we wasted a full hour emptily clicking through a semi-stranger's vacation pictures on Facebook, a time before every ex, every meaningless fling was a mere click away.  Unfriending My Ex (And Other Things I'll Never Do) is the first book to document the hilarity of the social media revolution from the inside; it chronicles a life filtered through our obsessive relationship with technology. The book is as eye-opening as it is entertaining as it proceeds through the various ways in which social media and mobile technology have generated empathy deficits and left us all with the attention spans of fruit flies;and the sad fact that in spite all of this, we find it impossible to switch our devices off...

My Thoughts:

I’m telling you, it took me all of two times of seeing Unfriending my Ex (and Other Things I’ll Never Do) by Kim Stolz in the store for me to finally just buy the book. I remember Kim Stolz from when she competed on America’s Next Top Model, when I still actively watched the show, which was a very long time ago. I didn’t really make the connection until I gave the synopsis a full read. I was interested. And you know what? That interest paid off, because Unfriending my Ex was a pretty interesting and surprisingly insightful book. Unfriending my Ex was the kind of book that made me really think more about the subject of what I was reading. I liked Stolz approach to the topic, and her writing was concise and engaging, which made getting into the book pretty easy. Unfriending my Ex was mostly about Kim Stolz and her use of internet and addiction to social media. It kind of follows her as she conducts an experiment by temporarily quitting social media. A lot of the book was spent exploring her thoughts about her experience and the lessons she learned while on her social media hiatus. The challenge that Stolz imposed on herself was interesting to read about, specifically her reaction to being without her phone for a straight week. Stolz made a lot of good points, and reading this book definitely made me evaluate the way I use social media and how often I’m logged in, if at all. Overall, I feel like I made a great choice by picking this one up.  

Rating 4/5