This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. I recently became a grandparent,

and I will say, watching from the proverbial sidelines, pregnancy and the early days of parenting

look very different from what I remember. There's a lot more information available and a lot more

technology involved.

That's the subject of Amanda Hess's new book, Second Life, having a child in the digital age.

Our producer Molly Rosen could relate.

I'll let her take it from here.

So there's a reason that I am doing this interview and not one of our hosts, and that's because I just had a baby nine months ago.

Oh my gosh.

I either recently experienced or am in the midst of some of the things that you write about in your book.

And I really felt like your book helped me process some questions that I did not even know would arise for me. You have written for many years

about the internet and pop culture, and this book is a lot about how various technologies mediated

the experience of your pregnancy and birth and parenting. When did you decide that there was a book here?

I think, you know, I have been writing about the internet for such a long time and I have this relationship with it where I have a

critical distance to the things that I'm investigating and it's very routine for me to look into

something that's happening on the internet and maybe like join into a community for a little bit and then leave and leave it behind emotionally too and it was immediately when I got pregnant that I realized that that was not going to happen this time and I just had a very different relationship where the

critical distance was like completely gone. But I did, just because I'm so used to it, I started

taking screenshots and notes of things that I was seeing related to pregnancy online from the very

beginning. And then when I was seven months pregnant and I had an abnormal

ultrasound and I realized that my pregnancy was less than normal, I had this feeling, this intense,

superstitious feeling that by taking notes on my experience and like writing little jokes to myself

about how funny maternity where

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