IRL Quotes

“In the end, blaming social media and the internet for the ways we edit and split may be just another means of hiding from ourselves—a way of denying truths about who we are, about things we struggled with long before Twitter or Instagram. To assign the blame elsewhere and say the fault lies outside of us, with something out there beyond our control. Something in the algorithms, or in the stars.”
― Chris Stedman, IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives

“In drag, the concept of “realness” doesn’t necessarily mean what you might think. For many drag artists, realness isn’t about trying to “pass”—to blend in with the crowd without notice—but rather about standing out and apart. By disrupting and shining a light on our assumptions, drag realness can expose that what is most real is in the in-between, in the blurring itself, in tearing up the playbook of gender. The realness of drag is that it heightens, dramatizes, and deviates in order to reveal—it holds up a mirror to us, showing us the gender baggage we inherit and inviting us to discard our conventions.”
― Chris Stedman, IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives

“Whether we are religious or nonreligious, today we can go online to meet the needs once served in religious spaces: to connect, but also to confess our secrets, seek out information, process tragedies, and pursue a more just world.”
― Chris Stedman, IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives

“Because, as a friend once said to me, social media is a kind of fun-house mirror of society, in that it warps some things and reveals others, which makes it confusing to navigate but also fertile ground for for the work of trying to better understand ourselves and the world around us. Because we are trying to do something new--because, in our digital search for meaning and realness, we are all amateurs--we have the opportunity to see things in a new way. So even though I sometimes feel tempted to look away from social media, I can't shake that feeling that jumping ship is not the best way to answer the questions I've been wrestling with for almost my entire life.”
― Chris Stedman, IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives